Brain cancer answers elusive at Spring House
Eight hundred miles from McCullom Lake, a university research group has started trying to get to the bottom of another alleged cancer cluster blamed on specialty chemical manufacturer Rohm and Haas.
At least 15 brain cancer cases have been reported among Rohm and Haas workers since the 1970s at its Spring House Technical Center north of Philadelphia. The cancers occurred mostly among researchers in two buildings at the campus-like complex, with five of the cases in one hallway. Rohm and Haas also is named in a class-action lawsuit and 22 individual lawsuits blaming air and water contamination from its Ringwood plant for brain and nerve cancers in and around McCullom Lake.
Spring House now is a puzzle for a University of Minnesota team to solve. Rohm and Haas chose the team in March after a federal agency harshly criticized the company's epidemiology studies, which concluded that the workplace cancer rates were not above average.
The team's first study, a cohort mortality study to determine any elevated causes of death among employees, could be finished by spring of 2010, said Bruce Alexander, associate professor of epidemiology and one of the principal investigators.
"We were asked to take a fresh, independent look at it," Alexander said. "We're not starting from ground zero. We're redoing that study, but taking a fresh look at it."
Former Rohm and Haas executive Tom Haag, who had belonged to an employee "stakeholder" group working with the team, said he got a different impression when the groups met in November. It was Haag's calling attention to the cases that persuaded Philadelphia attorney Aaron Freiwald to sue on behalf of employees, and those lawsuits, in turn, brought Freiwald to the attention of brain cancer victims in McCullom Lake looking for someone to take their cases.
"They made it very clear that they had to start all over again," Haag said. "It was not a question of cleaning up or adding to the Rohm and Haas studies. It was throw them in the trash can and start over."
Former company epidemiologist Arvind Carpenter concluded in 2003 and 2007 studies that Spring House was a safe place to work. But a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health panel blistered those studies in a December analysis.
Among NIOSH's harshest rebukes was the epidemiologist's decision to do the studies in reverse order from accepted standards, which they said is "highly unusual and perhaps methodologically unsound." The panel also said the company took a "scattershot approach" to identifying causes of death among workers.
Dr. Phil Lewis, Rohm and Haas vice president and director of environmental health and safety, said that NIOSH's critiques in no way repudiate the work of Carpenter, who retired last year. Lewis said he had asked NIOSH to review the work, and said the company had gone out of its way to be as transparent as possible about Spring House.
"Our contacting the University of Minnesota was in no way a comment on the scientific validity of what has been done to date," Lewis said.
Freiwald this year filed four more lawsuits on behalf of former Spring House employees with brain cancer, three of whom have died. Of the seven lawsuits to date, four of them are on behalf of employees who worked in one hallway.
"For some reason, Rohm and Haas continues to stand by those epidemiology studies, but I think that's just because they have to, and not because they're good science," Freiwald said.
A Pennsylvania state court rejected a class-action lawsuit that Freiwald filed to get medical monitoring for Spring House employees. A federal judge is expected to rule on whether the class-action lawsuit filed for the same on behalf of McCullom Lake residents can proceed to a civil trial.
To read and watch the Northwest Herald's ongoing coverage of the McCullom Lake and Spring House brain cancer lawsuits, visit NWHerald.com/mccullomlake.
To follow Rohm and Haas' work on the Spring House cases, visit www.rohmhaas.com/epi.