Posted by Eideard on 19 Nov 2012 / 0 Comment
RTFA for a long, predictable tale that ? to me ? is an indictment of North American industries focused on profit at any cost to workers. Lives lost improving the balance sheet are justified as far as corporate directors are concerned. Industry associations feel they have no stake in health and safety ? and federal regulatory agencies care about as much as they did, say, when granting oil drilling leases or evaluating residential mortgage backed securities during the reign of Bush and Cheney.
The study tells us what resulted from the last six years of exposure to these chemicals. What of the decades of women that lived and died in this industry before the study?
WINDSOR, Ontario ? For more than three decades, workers, most of them women, have complained of dreadful conditions in many of this city?s plastic automotive parts factories: Pungent fumes and dust that caused nosebleeds, headaches, nausea and dizziness. Blobs of smelly, smoldering plastic dumped directly onto the floor. ?It was like hell,? says one woman who still works in the industry.
The women fretted, usually in private, about what seemed to be an excess of cancer and other diseases in the factories across the river from Detroit. ?People were getting sick, but you never really thought about the plastic itself,? said Gina DeSantis, who has worked at a plant near Windsor for 25 years.
Now, workers like DeSantis are the focal point of a new study that appears to strengthen the tie between breast cancer and toxic exposures.
The six-year study, conducted by a team of researchers from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, examined the occupational histories of 1,006 women from Ontario?s Essex and Kent counties who had the disease and 1,146 who didn?t. Adjustments were made for smoking, weight, alcohol use and other lifestyle and reproductive factors.
The results, published online today in the journal Environmental Health, are striking: Women employed in the automotive plastics industry were almost five times as likely to develop breast cancer, prior to menopause, as women in the control group?
Sandy Knight, who worked at two Windsor plastics plants from 1978 to 1998, had a breast cancer scare in 2000, when she was 41. The cancer was at Stage III ? ?invasive and fast-growing???She had a single mastectomy and, following 10 years of hormonal treatment, is in remission?
?Why am I speaking to people today, in 2012, who are doing the same processes I did in 1980?? Knight asked. ?It just seems like we?re fighting the same battle. A lot of these chemicals should be removed from the workplace??
?These workplace chemicals are now present in our air, water, food and consumer products,? said one of the two principal investigators, James Brophy, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Windsor and a former occupational health clinic director. ?If we fail to take heed then we are doing so at our own peril.?
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