Posted on 09/03/2003 8:27:07 PM PDT by Pan_Yans Wife
While I.B.M. officials deny it, evidence is being offered by stricken employees that unusually large numbers of men and women who worked for the giant computer corporation over the past few decades have been dying prematurely.
I.B.M. employees, and relatives of employees who have died, are claiming in a series of very bitter lawsuits that I.B.M. workers have contracted cancer and other serious illnesses from chemicals they were exposed to in semiconductor and disk-drive manufacturing, laboratory work and other very basic industrial operations.
Dr. Richard Clapp, a respected epidemiologist from Boston University who was hired by a group of 40 plaintiffs in San Jose, said statistical analyses he has run from data provided by the company have shown troubling elevations of breast cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma and brain cancer among I.B.M. employees. He also said the cancers appeared to be occurring in I.B.M. employees at ages younger than the U.S. average.
Some of the stories are chilling. Gary Adams, a chemist, sadly offers the names of friends and co-workers from the mid-1960's to late 1970's who were part of a small product development group in Building 13 at the I.B.M. complex on San Jose's South Side: John Wong, Ray Hawkins, Gordon Mol, Dewayne Johnson, Al Smith, Dan Fields, Robert Cappell, Ken Hart.
All of them died after contracting malignant illnesses, most of them succumbing in their 30's and 40's. Incredibly, four of them died after developing brain cancer, a very rare disease in adults.
"There are not many still around," said Mr. Adams, who had a nonmalignant bone tumor removed from his left leg in 1985 and now suffers from a precancerous condition in his esophagus. "If we'd known all this from the beginning," he said, "we'd never have gone to work for I.B.M. We'd all have become shoe salesmen or something."
More than 200 plaintiffs in California, New York and Minnesota have sued I.B.M., which has spent many decades cultivating a reputation as a corporation that emphasized workplace safety and went out of its way to protect its employees. The lawsuits insist that the reality was otherwise, that officials at I.B.M. knew that workers were being put at risk of contracting cancer and other serious illnesses by their regular exposure to a variety of poisonous chemicals, many known to be carcinogens.
Companies that provided chemicals to I.B.M. are also defendants in the suits. The workers were not told of the risks, according to the lawsuits, even after they began showing symptoms of systemic chemical poisoning.
Alida Hernandez, a retired I.B.M. employee, held a number of jobs that required her to work with toxic chemicals. She learned she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in 1993. She told me this week, "If they had told me when I first interviewed that I would be working with hazardous chemicals that might cause cancer, I would not have gone to work."
I.B.M. has vehemently denied all of the plaintiffs' claims, and is being represented by Jones Day, one of the firms that represented R. J. Reynolds in the tobacco industry's fight against a long line of lawsuits.
I.B.M. officials have said all along — and repeated to me this week — that they do not believe there is any scientific basis for any of the plaintiffs' claims. There is no evidence, they said, that any employee contracted cancer as a result of exposure to chemicals at I.B.M. In a work force as large as I.B.M.'s, they said, many workers will die from many different illnesses, including cancer.
I.B.M. officials also said they will present their own experts who will refute Dr. Clapp's findings.
Four of the 40 lawsuits in San Jose are due to go to trial next month. All the suits are being watched extremely closely by the semiconductor industry, which had been warned for years that chip-making and other processes requiring the use of tremendous amounts of toxic chemicals might be associated with cancers, miscarriages, birth defects and other very serious health problems.
The processes at most U.S. plants, including I.B.M.'s, have improved. They are much cleaner and are believed to be much safer now. But an extraordinary number of workers were employed in the older facilities as the computer industry grew with breathtaking speed to become one of the dominant forces in American life in the last half of the 20th century.
This news might offset the analyst upgrade IBM got this week, if the info wasn't public knowledge previously.
Good gracious G-d, GARY HARTPENCE himself (who, with the aid of a totally turgid co-author) couldn't even write fiction THAT shabbily.
Well, being a moron, I suppose he could, but he'd have the devil of a time getting it published, assuming only that publishers cast a wary eye at political diatribes and ''exposes''.
Which, of course, they don't. Some publisher will put this nonsense out, just to try to exploit paranoia.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.