Word: vinyl
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...Vinyl chloride is a colorless gas that has been used as a propellant in such popular products as hair, disinfectant and insect sprays. It is also the principal ingredient of polyvinyl chlorides, the plastics that go into a host of familiar products including food wrappers and containers, suitcases, detergent bottles and garbage bags. No one questions vinyl chloride's utility, but a growing number of doctors now suspect its safety. Increasing evidence links vinyl chloride to a crippling bone disease and a rare but invariably fatal form of cancer...
Evidence of vinyl chloride's 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...
...before some enterprising museum (the Metropolitan?) opens a '60s Period Room, to go with its transplanted Louis Quinze paneling and reassembled colonial parlor: a Wesselmann and a Warhol Marilyn on the stainless-steel walls, a coffee table strewn with multiples and macadarnia nuts, a Panther poster above the vinyl settee, and under the supergraphic in the corner a waxwork group of Henry Geldzahler hustling that week's trend to a slim, wrinkled matron in bandoleers and Courrèges boots...
...considerable incredulity last week that New York's taxi masochists learned that one of the biggest fleets in town, called Helen Maintenance, had hired Designer Carleton Varney to refurbish its taxis in Holiday Inn splendor. The company's 104 Checker cabs will have green-and-white checked vinyl-covered seats, red tweed weather-resistant carpeting, solid green jump seats and matching interior walls. Seat belts will be bright red and ceilings will be painted blue-with an occasional white cloud and colorful bird -symbolizing, no doubt, New York's sky-high fares. Says a Panglossian spokesman...
...Doctors have long suspected that industrial exposure to vinyl chloride, a plastic substance, is dangerous. Their suspicions were further aroused recently when abnormalities were discovered in the livers of a number of workers in a B.F. Goodrich Co. chemical plant in Louisville, Ky., and it was found that four of the men had a malignancy called angiosarcoma of the liver. Last week the cancer was discovered in two more of the employees and confirmed as a contributing cause of death in an employee of a West Virginia plant. Although the action comes too late to save the workers who have...