PHILADELPHIA Chemical company probes tumors in its lab employees

Twelve people who work for the company have developed brain tumors.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Rohm and Haas Co. is studying the apparent high rate of brain tumors among employees at its laboratories in Spring House, Montgomery County, to see if the tumors are related to chemical exposure at work.
Twelve people who work or worked in the labs have developed brain tumors, some of them fatal. That's about twice the expected rate in the general population, company physicians estimate.
The study, which the company started in June 2002, is scheduled to be released next month, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Sunday.
While Rohm and Haas, the nation's sixth-largest chemical company, declined to release details of the 12 cases, the newspaper gathered information about eight of them through interviews with relatives and co-workers.
At least four people worked in or near a lab that developed pesticides, and at least five had similar kinds of tumors. But other cases appear unrelated.
One expert said the report may reveal clues to the illnesses but likely wouldn't unearth a "smoking gun."
"We don't ... know what causes brain tumors," said Melissa Bondy, an epidemiology professor at the University of Texas' M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who is not involved in the study. "We just haven't found it."
About 6,000 chemists, lab technicians and support staff have worked at the Spring House facility in its 40-year history, including 1,000 current employees.
1993 death
In April 1993, a CAT scan showed a fast-growing tumor pressing on Tom Szerlik's brain. A normally cheerful computer programmer on the pesticides floor, Szerlik had become moody and sometimes aggressive. Within a month of the diagnosis, the 58-year-old Levittown resident was dead.
Rohm and Haas requested his medical records a month later, but his wife Joan Szerlik never heard anything more until last year, when the company announced the study. She and some other victims' relatives wonder why more wasn't done sooner, given the repeated brain-tumor deaths.
"Wouldn't it have struck somebody?" Szerlik asked.
Other cases
Wayne Kachelries, a polymer chemist, died in 1980. Jay Ruth, a lab technician who mixed new forms of pesticides, died in 1986. Irv Adler, a pesticide chemist, died in 1990.
Robert Exner, 66, a human resources employee who worked briefly in a lab years ago, according to one co-worker, died in 2000. Barry Lange, 50, who invented polymers, pesticides and biocides at Spring House and has more than 50 patents in his name, died this year.
A co-worker of Lange's in biocides -- chemicals that kill bacteria in soaps, paints and other products -- is dying now. Another current employee has a benign tumor that does not appear to be growing.
Rohm and Haas said the number of cases did not seem unusual at first, partly because of delays in when they learned of them, due to the way cancers are reported in national databases, company spokesman Syd Havely said.
"As soon as there was an indication that there might have been (a high number of cases), we ... decided a study was absolutely prudent," he said. "We want to do everything we can."
Settlement
In 1986, Rohm and Haas paid more than $24 million to settle lawsuits over lung cancer linked to chemical exposure at its plant in the Bridesburg section of Philadelphia, while denying any wrongdoing.
The company said in 1975 that 27 people had died from the exposure to bis-chloromethyl ether, a contaminant known as BCME. An Inquirer investigation at the time found twice as many deaths, dating back to 1955, among exposed workers.