Word: livers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most people will seek any excuse to avoid seeing their dentists. An article in the A.M.A. Journal now offers a new one: dentists may be hepatitis carriers. This risk was revealed when four Baltimore physicians began investigating the cause of a small epidemic of the of ten severe liver ailment. None of the twelve victims had had blood transfusions, a common source of the infection. Nor were any of them drug users who might have contracted the disease from contaminated needles. But all had one thing in common - the same dentist, a 28-year-old man who had recently returned...
...toxicity has been around for years. Production of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) was begun in 1938 by B.F. Goodrich Co. That year experiments showed that the vinyl chloride gas used at the plant was dangerous to animals. A 1949 Russian study showed that vinyl chloride (VC) caused nonmalignant liver damage in 15 of 48 workers exposed to the chemical; surveys in other European countries over the next decade and a half confirmed the connection. In 1966 and 1967 British scientists examining PVC workers reported a high incidence of acro-osteolysis, a condition partially characterized by distortion of the skin and bones...
...cancer was first made in 1970 by Publio L. Viola of the University of Rome, who found tumors in the lungs, skin and bones of rats exposed to high concentrations of the gas. The link was strengthened in 1973 when researchers from Bonn University found evidence of liver damage in 19 out of 20 PVC workers at a single plant. The bombshell really burst early this year when B.F. Goodrich Co. reported that three men who worked with VC in its Louisville, Ky., plastics plant had died of angiosarcoma of the liver since 1971. Since then doctors have identified nine...
Their findings are all the more significant because angiosarcoma of the liver is so rare that it has been reported only about 100 times in medical history; a major hospital in Los Angeles found only one case in 52,000 autopsies. The discovery of a dozen closely linked cases thus constitutes a sort of mini epidemic of the disease. Since such cancers may not develop for at least 15 years after initial exposure, environmental health researchers suspect that more cases will be uncovered. Says J. William Lloyd, of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH): "I would suspect...
...plastics workers are real. A research team headed by Dr. Irving Selikoffof New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine has found that workers at one plant are exposed to VC levels of 400 to 500 parts per million of the gas, more than enough to cause liver disease in rats. Workers involved in cleaning the reactors in which VC is converted to PVC are exposed to even higher concentrations of the gas. One study showed that VC levels in these cookers range from 600 to a whopping 1,000 parts per million...