Sick and Suspicious (IBM workers)

[donsu]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/04/opinion/04HERB.html?ex=1063649160&ei=1&en=d4ff5ed29b42db1b

SAN JOSE, Calif. — 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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