Date:
10/27/2007 03:09 PM The trail of a buttery flavor leaves sick workers,
lawsuits
By SHARON COHEN
AP National Writer
Each morning, Eric Peoples sits up in bed
and starts his day with a cough. A deep, long, hacking cough.
He plants his feet on the bedroom floor and
immediately feels as if someone is standing on his chest.
That's a good day. When it gets really bad, it seems as though
a giant creature is crushing his lungs, squeezing the breath
out of him.
Eric Peoples has lived this way for several
years. He got sick while mixing butter flavoring at a Missouri
microwave popcorn plant, developing a ravaging lung disease
that has tormented a small but alarming number of food workers
across the nation.
Peoples sued. He won millions of dollars.
Money isn't a worry now. His health is.
At 35, he has lost three-fourths of his lung
capacity. He relies on oxygen when it's humid; one day, he
may need a double lung transplant.
Peoples says no amount of money can make up
for missing out on the chance to play ball with his son or
teach his daughter to ride a bike. He isn't as angry as he
once was, he says, and is thrilled that some microwave popcorn
makers will stop using the chemical tied to his illness.
But even now, it's confounding to him that
a pungent-smelling flavoring he poured in giant vats, a bright
yellow pudding-like substance used to improve the taste of
a common snack — popcorn — could change his life.
"When I first started getting sick, I
was trying to figure out what it was," he says. "It
never dawned on me that it was the butter flavoring. It's
food. You eat it. I kept telling my family, surely it can't
be. Why would something like that be harmful? How could it
be bad?"
———
In a world filled with hazards, some workers
obviously face perilous conditions: miners burrowing hundreds
of feet in the earth, farmers spraying pesticides, meatpackers
wielding long knives to carve up huge carcasses moving quickly
down a line.
By that yardstick, mixing an additive that's
used to flavor popcorn, candy, baked goods and other foods
— it's also found naturally in small amounts in staples
such as milk and butter — almost seems innocuous.
But to many, it's not.
For several years, diacetyl, a chemical that
gives foods a buttery taste, has been linked to a rare, irreversible
lung disease. The result has been a public health debate that
has stretched from Congress to courtrooms across the nation,
leading to tens of millions of dollars in judgments.
Scientists, doctors, politicians, food companies,
labor unions, lawyers and others have weighed in — some
pointing angry fingers at the government — as hundreds
of workers have claimed they have severe lung disease or other
respiratory illnesses from inhaling diacetyl vapors.
And it may go beyond workers. It was recently
disclosed that a man who ate at least two bags of buttery
microwave popcorn daily for several years may have the same
disease found in workers. His lung problems were linked to
breathing the vapors.
Now some major microwave popcorn companies
have eliminated or plan to drop the ingredient, while Congress
— with the support of the flavoring industry —
is looking to reduce the danger in the workplace. But the
Bush administration, some business groups and others say there
isn't enough scientific evidence to warrant immediate government
limits.
Edwin Foulke Jr., a top federal official,
testified this spring at a congressional hearing that diacetyl
is a "substance of suspicion," but there's no clear
evidence it's the one chemical that causes this disease.
But the doctor who was one of the first to
detect the illness in workers says the science is solid and
popcorn makers are right to drop diacetyl.
"I just wish this had been done earlier,"
says Dr. Allen Parmet, a Kansas City public health physician.
"There are hundreds of people who are sick and who are
hurt and it never should have happened."
———
Seven years ago, an attorney asked Parmet
to review the medical records of several workers with some
unusual lung problems.
Within 20 minutes, Parmet says, he knew what
it was: bronchiolitis obliterans, a devastating disease that
destroys the small airways of the lungs, leaving victims coughing
and gasping for air.
Parmet had seen it only three times in 25
years. Now he was poring over documents indicating several
people had the disease — all employees of the Gilster-Mary
Lee microwave popcorn plant in Jasper, Mo.
"It was 'holy smokes!'" he says.
"I've got eight or nine cases here in a group of 200
people in a town of 1,000. Mentally, I've made this leap —
that's an epidemic."
The National Institute for Occupational Safety
and Health dispatched investigators to the plant. By 2001,
it had reported a link between butter flavorings and the disease,
which became known as popcorn lung.
Three years later, the agency sent an alert
to 4,000 companies with about 150,000 workers explaining steps
that should be take as safety precautions, such as respirators
and better ventilation systems.
Keith Campbell already was sick.
He says he was diagnosed with bronchiolitis
obliterans in 2002, after working two years at a ConAgra microwave
popcorn plant in Ohio.
Why, he asks, did it take five years to do
something about this?
"Once something is found out something
is bad for you, instead of trying to control it, I think it
should be banned," he says. "I don't care if it's
butter flavoring or a nuclear power plant."
Campbell doesn't blame the plant. He sued
the flavor companies, winning an undisclosed settlement. But
it's a hollow victory.
"I got a new truck and new home, but
I paid a high price for it," he says. "They tell
me I've got the lungs of an 80 year old. If I was 80, I'd
be pretty perky. But when you're 50, it stinks."
Bronchiolitis obliterans can be confused for
asthma or bronchitis. Sometimes, the disease progresses very
quickly.
"In months you can go from being a healthy
person to hardly being able to breathe, coughing all the time,
not being able to do your job," says Dr. Richard Kanwal,
a NIOSH medical officer who has investigated the illness since
2001. "It's terrifying."
Over the years, NIOSH investigators have identified
or reviewed medical records of dozens of cases in microwave
popcorn plants in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and Ohio
and flavor-making plants in California, Indiana, New Jersey,
Maryland and Ohio.
There have been three reports of deaths among
workers.
How many people are ill is unclear.
Kanwal says some cases may have gone undetected
many years ago — a few go back to the 1980s —
and he has heard reports of sick workers at candy and potato
chip plants but has not yet been able to investigate them.
"There could be dozens or hundreds more
that we're not aware of," he says.
There are, however, hundreds of claims filling
the court dockets.
Missouri attorney Ken McClain has more than
500 lawsuits pending against the companies that produce or
use the butter flavoring. About $50 million has been awarded
in verdicts that were later settled for confidential amounts.
Another 100 cases have been settled that reportedly involve
tens of millions of dollars.
As civil lawsuits have increased, so, too,
has pressure on federal agencies by scientists, unions and
some in Congress to do more to protect workers.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration
has been criticized by some researchers, unions and doctors
who claim the agency has been lax, not ordering safety standards
or increasing inspections at plants using diacetyl.
"Their performance has been miserable,"
says David Michaels, a professor of occupational and environmental
health at the George Washington University School of Public
Health who writes about diacetyl on his blog.
This spring, Foulke, assistant secretary of
labor for OSHA, defended his agency, saying that after the
2001 Missouri cases, it alerted its regional offices and ordered
them to look into the issue. He also said the OSHA region
that included many popcorn plants produced a brochure.
"Sending out a brochure is not enough
when you've got a disease that's destroying people's lungs,"
Michaels says.
OSHA has increased its activity on diacetyl
since April, with stepped-up inspections of microwave popcorn
plants that use the flavoring and a program to minimize or
eliminate the workers' exposure to chemical hazards.
For Michaels, it's too little, too late.
Why, he asks, weren't plants inspected earlier,
and why hasn't there been more attention on flavor workers
who've become ill?
"It would have been better," he
says, "to be safe than sorry."
———
After years of studies and lawsuits, the popcorn
lung debate reached the floor of Congress this fall.
In September, the U.S. House of Representatives
ordered federal safety regulators to compel microwave popcorn
factories and other plants to limit exposure to diacetyl.
The bill is supported by the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers
Association.
Whether that measure will become law is unclear.
Opponents say this step is premature and believe that focusing
on diacetyl alone ignores the possibility other flavorings
are involved in the disease.
Foulke, the OSHA official, recently denied
a labor petition asking for an emergency workplace limit on
the chemical, saying there isn't conclusive proof it causes
the illness or that exposures "constitute a grave danger."
He also noted that four major companies are
eliminating diacetyl.
That won't help Eric Peoples. He takes a dozen
pills each morning — and tries not to worry.
"This is a pain to live the way I am,"
he says. "But there's always somebody worse than I am.
And every morning, I keep telling myself, it's one more day
this thing hasn't beaten me."
