It might be legit, but the way these lawyers conduct these type of lawsuits is sickening. For the most part they wind up collecting millions and then they split the remains among all the clients and they each wind up with very little. The lawyers who promote these lawsuits certainly don't do so for the benefit of their clients.
I will be interested to see the article, sounds very bizarre.
I will be interested to see the article, sounds very bizarre.
Here's a good start.....it was apparently lung disease-and this isn't an isolated incident http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=microwave+popcorn+lawsuit
Is butter flavoring ruining popcorn workers' lungs?
By Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY
<TABLE class=sidebar cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=190 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD rowSpan=5>
</TD><TD bgColor=#009933 rowSpan=6>
</TD><TD vAlign=top width=10 bgColor=#009933>
</TD><TD class=money-paintbox-label vAlign=top width=168 colSpan=2>No risk to consumers</TD><TD bgColor=#009933 rowSpan=6>
</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=top width=10 rowSpan=3>
</TD><TD vAlign=top width=158>
</TD><TD vAlign=top width=10 rowSpan=3>
</TD></TR><TR><TD class=sidebar vAlign=top width=158>Federal health officials say there is no evidence that microwave popcorn poses any risk to consumers. The lung disease workers have experienced is a job-related health condition. Doctors say the amount of popcorn butter flavoring consumers inhale in making popcorn or eating it is believed to be too small to pose any health risk.
</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=top width=158>
</TD></TR><TR><TD bgColor=#009933 colSpan=3>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
JASPER, Mo. — When the days turn humid in this farming town, the air becomes thick with the smell of butter from the Gilster-Mary Lee plant, a microwave-popcorn factory and one of the area's largest employers. At night, when the buildings' lights are ablaze, some residents say they've seen a yellowish cloud emanate from the building and fill the dark sky. For years, no one here complained much about the odor or the fumes, figuring those were harmless prices to pay for prosperity. But a growing number of workers say the cause of that aroma is destroying their lungs. Some former workers are afflicted with a rare lung disease believed to be caused by inhaling a substance never suspected as an on-the-job hazard: the butter flavoring in microwave popcorn.
The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has dispatched investigators here and to similar plants elsewhere in the country, suspects this might be a new occupational illness that could be afflicting employees at other food plants nationwide.
This is a behind-the-scenes look at the federal investigators' search for a potential new workplace disease — dubbed Popcorn Packers' Lung by the doctors who first identified these cases.
The disease is lethal and irreversible, doctors say. At least 30 former employees at the plant here have severe breathing problems, and nearly all may eventually need new lungs, according to a lawsuit filed by workers and lawyers on the case. Four have been accepted on lung transplant lists, and doctors say some are functioning on less than a third of a working lung.
Current workers at the Gilster-Mary Lee plant in Jasper are more than twice as likely as other Americans to have respiratory problems, according to federal studies, and some have also developed rashes so severe that their skin has peeled off.
Because butter flavoring is also used at other plants where food products are manufactured, investigators say this could go beyond popcorn. In fact, cases already have been found in other states. Health officials say smoking doesn't cause the lung disease.
"Workers exposed to flavorings at microwave-popcorn factories are at risk for developing fixed obstructive lung disease," according to an April report by the CDC.
It's not known what ingredient, if any, in the flavoring could be the cause. There is no evidence consumers who eat microwave popcorn or visit movie theaters where butter flavoring is used are at risk.
Former workers are suing New York-based International Flavors & Fragrances, which makes the flavoring used in Jasper. According to the lawsuit, the firm knew its product was dangerous but didn't provide warnings or instructions on safe use.
International Flavors & Fragrances officials say the lawsuit is without merit and the butter flavoring is not to blame. The flavorings "are safe for handling and use by workers in food manufacturing plants when used in accordance with specified safety procedures," according to a statement.
Gilster-Mary Lee, which bought the popcorn factory in 1999, says it has "provided, and will continue to provide, a safe, healthy work environment for its employees."
Lawyers say it's premature to speculate on what effect the cases could have on the companies, but both have insurance expected to provide some financial protection.
Every day, employees nationwide come into contact with thousands of chemicals, most of which have never been tested. There are historical precedents for what may be happening here. Workplace substances once considered safe, such as asbestos and lead, have later been found to be hazards.
A case like the one in Jasper offers a rare glimpse into the unraveling of an epidemiological mystery that has devastated workers' lives and sent federal and state health investigators scrambling to protect future victims.
November 1999
For months before Thanksgiving, Jace Kentner had been getting calls from his mother. She was worried about health problems plaguing his stepfather, Hal Woods. She said he had a cough. Red eyes. A rash on his feet and hands.
When Kentner, a lawyer in Lake of the Ozarks, Mo., was visiting for the holiday, he quickly saw that this was no little rash.
Woods sat in a chair with plastic bags tied around his hands. Inside the bags, his fingers were bathed in a Vaseline-like jelly to keep his skin from falling off. Woods' skin was cracking open like parched desert soil. Inch-thick chunks were sloughing off his feet.
The condition was so painful he could hardly stand on the productionline where he worked in Jasper, churning microwave popcorn that lawyers and a spokesman for Gilster say was sold under such various labels as Best Choice and Always Save. "It was peeling off in chunks, like a leper," Kentner says. "Two- and three-inch chunks of skin were just peeling off."
Kentner, who has experience with workers' compensation law, suspected his stepfather's job was causing the health problems. He decided to represent his stepfather in a claim against the plant.
He didn't realize the magnitude of what he was taking on.
December 1999
Jasper is a cozy town tucked amid emerald-green soybean fields. The town includes Judy's Café, the diner where all the regulars go, as well as a gospel church and a grocery where gossip is as much of a commodity as the produce.
Here, word spread quickly about Kentner's plan to file a workers' compensation claim against the popcorn plant. Back in Lake of the Ozarks, Kentner received calls from former plant employees.
All had lung or skin problems.
This was bigger than his stepfather's case. Kentner suspected he might have a product-liability lawsuit against the company that made products used at the plant. He couldn't handle this alone.
He turned to Wright Green & Baughman, a firm in Blue Springs, Mo., that three lawyers had just started. One of them, Ted Green, 33, agreed to go with Kentner to meet former Jasper employees.
They spoke with Linda Redman, 53, of Joplin, Mo., who became sick in 1996. When they met her, she was in the hospital, tethered to oxygen to assist her breathing.
They spoke with Angela Nally of Carthage, Mo., a former plant worker who'd battled breathing problems for years.
But it wasn't until they met Eric Peoples that Green really suspected he had a case, maybe the case of a lifetime. Peoples sat in a chair at his Carthage, Mo., apartment, his two young children off silently playing. He got up to get a glass of water and stopped for air. In the quiet house, the two lawyers could hear him wheezing over the patter of rain on the roof.
Peoples had worked in the mixing room, handling five-gallon buckets of yellow butter flavoring as thick as vanilla pudding. He developed a rattling cough in 1998 that doctors diagnosed as pneumonia — only it didn't get better. Now he was on the waiting list for a double lung transplant, his lung capacity down to 18%. He was 28 years old at the time.
April 2000
Over the years, plant workers had received a medley of diagnoses from pneumonia to asthma to hay fever. Some were on inhalers doctors thought might open their airways, others on steroids they thought could reduce swelling. Workers say nothing worked.
The lawyers say that, until then, no one had publicly put it together. Were all the cases related? Green and Kentner began collecting medical records; some patients' files were as thick as telephone books. What could be the cause?
They needed an expert medical opinion. In spring 2000, they found their expert in Allen Parmet, a doctor at Midwest Occupational Medicine in Kansas City, Mo. Poring over pages of diagnoses, Parmet realized at least six of the workers appeared to have a lung disease — bronchiolitis obliterans — so rare he'd seen it only three times in his career.
All appeared to have a narrowing of the passageways that feed air into the lungs, like a blocked straw poking into a soft-drink can. It didn't matter how hard they inhaled, not enough air could get through.
"Holy smokes," Parmet says he thought. "This could be a public health issue." Parmet placed a call to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services in Jefferson City, Mo.
May 2000
Eduardo Simoes, a doctor in charge of the agency's epidemiology office, had been told about a doctor in Kansas City who'd seen eight popcorn-plant workers with lung disease. How unusual was that?
Simoes did some math. He figured there was roughly a one-in-10,000 chance of such an occurrence being purely coincidental.
He told his staff to contact the Jasper plant to set up an inspection. In a conference call, they informed managers at the company of what was going on. Gilster-Mary Lee noted in a statement that the company "voluntarily worked with NIOSH to investigate a possible work-related illness of some former employees." State and federal officials also say the company cooperated in the investigation.
Simoes spent weeks reviewing medical records. More than 550 workers had been employed at the plant from 1992 to 2000, and roughly 130 worked there now. How many had symptoms?
The eight workers with severe lung disease had worked in the microwave-popcorn packaging or mixing areas, which are connected by doors, where salt, soybean oil and flavorings are blended into a heated tank.
A common link?
"This was extremely rare, exceptionally rare," Simoes says. "Clearly, we had a problem."
By August, Simoes wrote to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a branch of the CDC based in Washington, and requested help.
August 2000
When the request came, Kathleen Kreiss sent investigators to Jasper to begin working on the case. There was no time to waste.
"To have a cluster like this is disturbing and unusual," says Kreiss, chief of the field studies branch at NIOSH's Division of Respiratory Disease Studies in Morgantown, W.Va. "We were told there were people on lung transplant lists, so we knew this was extreme. There was public health action to be taken."
Industrial hygienists from the government soon headed to the plant to sample the air, which they reported was thick with salt dust, soybean oil and the smell of butter. Advice also would be given to plant managers about engineering changes to reduce exposure.
What, they wondered, was destroying some of the workers' lungs? Could it be salt? Maybe, but people who work in salt mines don't have higher rates of lung disease. Could it be oil? Maybe.
But there was another possibility. "We were beginning to suspect that buttery flavor we all eat and enjoy," Kreiss says.
November 2000
How many workers had symptoms? The race was on to find out.
Metal trailers used to test the lungs of coal workers for black lung were set up in the company parking lot. Workers filed in for tests administered by NIOSH. Health officials tested their lung function. Chest X-rays were taken, and employees answered questions about job duties.
First came the consent form. Then the questions. Where do you work? How long have you been at the plant? The workers came in at a trickle. Then more. In total, 117 were included in the study.
Some, like Angela Nally, had battled breathing or skin problems for years. In 1994, she was so sick doctors took out a chunk of her lung to study. Her cough had begun after about four months on her job, which drew nearby residents because the pay could top $11 an hour. Doctors told her it was asthma and gave her fistfuls of inhalers. On her breaks, she would go to the ladies' room and use five inhalers, one right after the other, before returning to the line. "I thought it would go away," she says. "I thought it would get better."
But the coughing got worse. Doctors took an X-ray after she complained of a stabbing pain. It turned out she'd coughed so violently, she'd snapped a rib.
Others were like Peoples. In 1999, doctors told him he would eventually need new lungs. But a medication he'd begun in 2000 stabilized the disease and meant he could wait longer for a transplant, even though his lungs were functioning at only 20% capacity.
He used to play Frisbee and wade in the creeks with his son and daughter. But because of his breathing problems, the family now had game night. They'd pull out the checkerboard or cards and play together in the small apartment. "Daddy has a disease in his lungs," Peoples told his children. "We're learning new ways to be as a family."
By December, concerned that others might be at risk, federal investigators recommended to plant managers that employees in the microwave-popcorn production area don respirators.
January 2001
As their case grew, lawyer Green realized he needed the assistance of a larger team. In January, he took his case to Kenneth McClain of Humphrey Farrington McClain & Edgar in Independence, Mo. McClain took up the case.
Federal investigators were zeroing in on the butter flavoring, a yellow substance with a thick consistency. The contents include many organic compounds and a substance known as diacetyl, which also occurs naturally in foods such as butter, coffee and cheese.
There were reasons they suspected it. Employees who worked in the microwave-popcorn production area, where they inhaled higher concentrations of butter flavoring, appeared to have more breathing problems than employees who worked in offices or packaging, according to NIOSH reports.
And a NIOSH employee remembered a federal health report that had found that workers at a different food plant — a bakery in South Bend, Ind. — had developed similar lung problems.
Butter and other flavorings are often used in baked products; diacetyl was listed as one ingredient the bakery used.
NIOSH decided to test the butter flavoring on rats.
April 2001
Six white male rats were in their cages when the butter flavoring was piped through. They inhaled it at levels 3 1/2 times the highest average exposure in the plant.
The rats, which developed a mucus-like discharge tinged with a red coloration, began to look sick. They lifted their heads as if their noses were stuffed. One animal died. Autopsies were done on the rats, which were euthanized 18 hours after their exposure. In all cases, the cells lining their airways were beginning to die. It was a chilling find.
"I don't like to see that under my microscope," says Ann Hubbs, a NIOSH veterinary pathologist. "It's deeply concerning to those of us who try to protect the public."
Meanwhile, workers at the plant continued to get worse. A few employees who hadn't had any symptoms developed them between the beginning of November 2000 and April 2001, according to a NIOSH report. Alarmed, NIOSH officials urged plant managers to isolate the mixing area from where employees work.
Testing on the workers also showed patterns.
According to NIOSH reports, plant employees had 2.6 times the rates of chronic cough and shortness of breath compared with other Americans of the same age group and smoking habits. Older employees who had never smoked had more than 11 times more airway obstructions than the national rate.
Federal investigators believed something in the butter flavor was the cause, and many suspected diacetyl. The question on investigators' minds now was whether other workers in the country could be at risk.
Susanna Von Essen, a professor in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, was the first to find out. Her patient had a lingering cough. He also worked at a food-processing plant. According to a CDC report, he was to be the first case identified outside Jasper.
June 2002
The mystery that began more than a year earlier with a lawyer worried about his stepfather led to the discovery of a potential workplace hazard.
Today, interest in the discovery is mounting as information about cases outside Jasper is found. The probe is expanding. This spring, the CDC published a report stating "the results of this investigation raise concern about possible risk for workers in other flavoring and food production industries."
"This teaches us there are previously unrecognized, serious problems that can emerge. We need a strong system that helps us identify things early," says Kathleen Rest, NIOSH's acting director. "Popcorn will not be the last."
http://www.usatoday.com/money/general/2002/06/20/popcorn-factory.htm
By Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY
<TABLE class=sidebar cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=190 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD rowSpan=5>
</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=top width=158>
JASPER, Mo. — When the days turn humid in this farming town, the air becomes thick with the smell of butter from the Gilster-Mary Lee plant, a microwave-popcorn factory and one of the area's largest employers. At night, when the buildings' lights are ablaze, some residents say they've seen a yellowish cloud emanate from the building and fill the dark sky. For years, no one here complained much about the odor or the fumes, figuring those were harmless prices to pay for prosperity. But a growing number of workers say the cause of that aroma is destroying their lungs. Some former workers are afflicted with a rare lung disease believed to be caused by inhaling a substance never suspected as an on-the-job hazard: the butter flavoring in microwave popcorn.
The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has dispatched investigators here and to similar plants elsewhere in the country, suspects this might be a new occupational illness that could be afflicting employees at other food plants nationwide.
This is a behind-the-scenes look at the federal investigators' search for a potential new workplace disease — dubbed Popcorn Packers' Lung by the doctors who first identified these cases.
The disease is lethal and irreversible, doctors say. At least 30 former employees at the plant here have severe breathing problems, and nearly all may eventually need new lungs, according to a lawsuit filed by workers and lawyers on the case. Four have been accepted on lung transplant lists, and doctors say some are functioning on less than a third of a working lung.
Current workers at the Gilster-Mary Lee plant in Jasper are more than twice as likely as other Americans to have respiratory problems, according to federal studies, and some have also developed rashes so severe that their skin has peeled off.
Because butter flavoring is also used at other plants where food products are manufactured, investigators say this could go beyond popcorn. In fact, cases already have been found in other states. Health officials say smoking doesn't cause the lung disease.
"Workers exposed to flavorings at microwave-popcorn factories are at risk for developing fixed obstructive lung disease," according to an April report by the CDC.
It's not known what ingredient, if any, in the flavoring could be the cause. There is no evidence consumers who eat microwave popcorn or visit movie theaters where butter flavoring is used are at risk.
Former workers are suing New York-based International Flavors & Fragrances, which makes the flavoring used in Jasper. According to the lawsuit, the firm knew its product was dangerous but didn't provide warnings or instructions on safe use.
International Flavors & Fragrances officials say the lawsuit is without merit and the butter flavoring is not to blame. The flavorings "are safe for handling and use by workers in food manufacturing plants when used in accordance with specified safety procedures," according to a statement.
Gilster-Mary Lee, which bought the popcorn factory in 1999, says it has "provided, and will continue to provide, a safe, healthy work environment for its employees."
Lawyers say it's premature to speculate on what effect the cases could have on the companies, but both have insurance expected to provide some financial protection.
Every day, employees nationwide come into contact with thousands of chemicals, most of which have never been tested. There are historical precedents for what may be happening here. Workplace substances once considered safe, such as asbestos and lead, have later been found to be hazards.
A case like the one in Jasper offers a rare glimpse into the unraveling of an epidemiological mystery that has devastated workers' lives and sent federal and state health investigators scrambling to protect future victims.
November 1999
For months before Thanksgiving, Jace Kentner had been getting calls from his mother. She was worried about health problems plaguing his stepfather, Hal Woods. She said he had a cough. Red eyes. A rash on his feet and hands.
When Kentner, a lawyer in Lake of the Ozarks, Mo., was visiting for the holiday, he quickly saw that this was no little rash.
Woods sat in a chair with plastic bags tied around his hands. Inside the bags, his fingers were bathed in a Vaseline-like jelly to keep his skin from falling off. Woods' skin was cracking open like parched desert soil. Inch-thick chunks were sloughing off his feet.
The condition was so painful he could hardly stand on the productionline where he worked in Jasper, churning microwave popcorn that lawyers and a spokesman for Gilster say was sold under such various labels as Best Choice and Always Save. "It was peeling off in chunks, like a leper," Kentner says. "Two- and three-inch chunks of skin were just peeling off."
Kentner, who has experience with workers' compensation law, suspected his stepfather's job was causing the health problems. He decided to represent his stepfather in a claim against the plant.
He didn't realize the magnitude of what he was taking on.
December 1999
Jasper is a cozy town tucked amid emerald-green soybean fields. The town includes Judy's Café, the diner where all the regulars go, as well as a gospel church and a grocery where gossip is as much of a commodity as the produce.
Here, word spread quickly about Kentner's plan to file a workers' compensation claim against the popcorn plant. Back in Lake of the Ozarks, Kentner received calls from former plant employees.
All had lung or skin problems.
This was bigger than his stepfather's case. Kentner suspected he might have a product-liability lawsuit against the company that made products used at the plant. He couldn't handle this alone.
He turned to Wright Green & Baughman, a firm in Blue Springs, Mo., that three lawyers had just started. One of them, Ted Green, 33, agreed to go with Kentner to meet former Jasper employees.
They spoke with Linda Redman, 53, of Joplin, Mo., who became sick in 1996. When they met her, she was in the hospital, tethered to oxygen to assist her breathing.
They spoke with Angela Nally of Carthage, Mo., a former plant worker who'd battled breathing problems for years.
But it wasn't until they met Eric Peoples that Green really suspected he had a case, maybe the case of a lifetime. Peoples sat in a chair at his Carthage, Mo., apartment, his two young children off silently playing. He got up to get a glass of water and stopped for air. In the quiet house, the two lawyers could hear him wheezing over the patter of rain on the roof.
Peoples had worked in the mixing room, handling five-gallon buckets of yellow butter flavoring as thick as vanilla pudding. He developed a rattling cough in 1998 that doctors diagnosed as pneumonia — only it didn't get better. Now he was on the waiting list for a double lung transplant, his lung capacity down to 18%. He was 28 years old at the time.
April 2000
Over the years, plant workers had received a medley of diagnoses from pneumonia to asthma to hay fever. Some were on inhalers doctors thought might open their airways, others on steroids they thought could reduce swelling. Workers say nothing worked.
The lawyers say that, until then, no one had publicly put it together. Were all the cases related? Green and Kentner began collecting medical records; some patients' files were as thick as telephone books. What could be the cause?
They needed an expert medical opinion. In spring 2000, they found their expert in Allen Parmet, a doctor at Midwest Occupational Medicine in Kansas City, Mo. Poring over pages of diagnoses, Parmet realized at least six of the workers appeared to have a lung disease — bronchiolitis obliterans — so rare he'd seen it only three times in his career.
All appeared to have a narrowing of the passageways that feed air into the lungs, like a blocked straw poking into a soft-drink can. It didn't matter how hard they inhaled, not enough air could get through.
"Holy smokes," Parmet says he thought. "This could be a public health issue." Parmet placed a call to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services in Jefferson City, Mo.
May 2000
Eduardo Simoes, a doctor in charge of the agency's epidemiology office, had been told about a doctor in Kansas City who'd seen eight popcorn-plant workers with lung disease. How unusual was that?
Simoes did some math. He figured there was roughly a one-in-10,000 chance of such an occurrence being purely coincidental.
He told his staff to contact the Jasper plant to set up an inspection. In a conference call, they informed managers at the company of what was going on. Gilster-Mary Lee noted in a statement that the company "voluntarily worked with NIOSH to investigate a possible work-related illness of some former employees." State and federal officials also say the company cooperated in the investigation.
Simoes spent weeks reviewing medical records. More than 550 workers had been employed at the plant from 1992 to 2000, and roughly 130 worked there now. How many had symptoms?
The eight workers with severe lung disease had worked in the microwave-popcorn packaging or mixing areas, which are connected by doors, where salt, soybean oil and flavorings are blended into a heated tank.
A common link?
"This was extremely rare, exceptionally rare," Simoes says. "Clearly, we had a problem."
By August, Simoes wrote to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a branch of the CDC based in Washington, and requested help.
August 2000
When the request came, Kathleen Kreiss sent investigators to Jasper to begin working on the case. There was no time to waste.
"To have a cluster like this is disturbing and unusual," says Kreiss, chief of the field studies branch at NIOSH's Division of Respiratory Disease Studies in Morgantown, W.Va. "We were told there were people on lung transplant lists, so we knew this was extreme. There was public health action to be taken."
Industrial hygienists from the government soon headed to the plant to sample the air, which they reported was thick with salt dust, soybean oil and the smell of butter. Advice also would be given to plant managers about engineering changes to reduce exposure.
What, they wondered, was destroying some of the workers' lungs? Could it be salt? Maybe, but people who work in salt mines don't have higher rates of lung disease. Could it be oil? Maybe.
But there was another possibility. "We were beginning to suspect that buttery flavor we all eat and enjoy," Kreiss says.
November 2000
How many workers had symptoms? The race was on to find out.
Metal trailers used to test the lungs of coal workers for black lung were set up in the company parking lot. Workers filed in for tests administered by NIOSH. Health officials tested their lung function. Chest X-rays were taken, and employees answered questions about job duties.
First came the consent form. Then the questions. Where do you work? How long have you been at the plant? The workers came in at a trickle. Then more. In total, 117 were included in the study.
Some, like Angela Nally, had battled breathing or skin problems for years. In 1994, she was so sick doctors took out a chunk of her lung to study. Her cough had begun after about four months on her job, which drew nearby residents because the pay could top $11 an hour. Doctors told her it was asthma and gave her fistfuls of inhalers. On her breaks, she would go to the ladies' room and use five inhalers, one right after the other, before returning to the line. "I thought it would go away," she says. "I thought it would get better."
But the coughing got worse. Doctors took an X-ray after she complained of a stabbing pain. It turned out she'd coughed so violently, she'd snapped a rib.
Others were like Peoples. In 1999, doctors told him he would eventually need new lungs. But a medication he'd begun in 2000 stabilized the disease and meant he could wait longer for a transplant, even though his lungs were functioning at only 20% capacity.
He used to play Frisbee and wade in the creeks with his son and daughter. But because of his breathing problems, the family now had game night. They'd pull out the checkerboard or cards and play together in the small apartment. "Daddy has a disease in his lungs," Peoples told his children. "We're learning new ways to be as a family."
By December, concerned that others might be at risk, federal investigators recommended to plant managers that employees in the microwave-popcorn production area don respirators.
January 2001
As their case grew, lawyer Green realized he needed the assistance of a larger team. In January, he took his case to Kenneth McClain of Humphrey Farrington McClain & Edgar in Independence, Mo. McClain took up the case.
Federal investigators were zeroing in on the butter flavoring, a yellow substance with a thick consistency. The contents include many organic compounds and a substance known as diacetyl, which also occurs naturally in foods such as butter, coffee and cheese.
There were reasons they suspected it. Employees who worked in the microwave-popcorn production area, where they inhaled higher concentrations of butter flavoring, appeared to have more breathing problems than employees who worked in offices or packaging, according to NIOSH reports.
And a NIOSH employee remembered a federal health report that had found that workers at a different food plant — a bakery in South Bend, Ind. — had developed similar lung problems.
Butter and other flavorings are often used in baked products; diacetyl was listed as one ingredient the bakery used.
NIOSH decided to test the butter flavoring on rats.
April 2001
Six white male rats were in their cages when the butter flavoring was piped through. They inhaled it at levels 3 1/2 times the highest average exposure in the plant.
The rats, which developed a mucus-like discharge tinged with a red coloration, began to look sick. They lifted their heads as if their noses were stuffed. One animal died. Autopsies were done on the rats, which were euthanized 18 hours after their exposure. In all cases, the cells lining their airways were beginning to die. It was a chilling find.
"I don't like to see that under my microscope," says Ann Hubbs, a NIOSH veterinary pathologist. "It's deeply concerning to those of us who try to protect the public."
Meanwhile, workers at the plant continued to get worse. A few employees who hadn't had any symptoms developed them between the beginning of November 2000 and April 2001, according to a NIOSH report. Alarmed, NIOSH officials urged plant managers to isolate the mixing area from where employees work.
Testing on the workers also showed patterns.
According to NIOSH reports, plant employees had 2.6 times the rates of chronic cough and shortness of breath compared with other Americans of the same age group and smoking habits. Older employees who had never smoked had more than 11 times more airway obstructions than the national rate.
Federal investigators believed something in the butter flavor was the cause, and many suspected diacetyl. The question on investigators' minds now was whether other workers in the country could be at risk.
Susanna Von Essen, a professor in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, was the first to find out. Her patient had a lingering cough. He also worked at a food-processing plant. According to a CDC report, he was to be the first case identified outside Jasper.
June 2002
The mystery that began more than a year earlier with a lawyer worried about his stepfather led to the discovery of a potential workplace hazard.
Today, interest in the discovery is mounting as information about cases outside Jasper is found. The probe is expanding. This spring, the CDC published a report stating "the results of this investigation raise concern about possible risk for workers in other flavoring and food production industries."
"This teaches us there are previously unrecognized, serious problems that can emerge. We need a strong system that helps us identify things early," says Kathleen Rest, NIOSH's acting director. "Popcorn will not be the last."
http://www.usatoday.com/money/general/2002/06/20/popcorn-factory.htm
