Here is an investigation that really captured me. I have never seen this topic before. The victims are everyday working men and women who make their living behind a welder's mask.
The story opens with a bear of man -- a longtime welder whose hands began shaking in 2001 -- and looks at the decades-long and usually behind-the-scenes fight that has been going on in lawsuits over manganese poisoning. (The story says at least 2,800 lawsuits are pending nationwide.)
You will see below that this ingredient in welding rods has been suspect for decades, but the welding industry has spent more than $12 million dollars on studies to show their products are safe (or at least can be used safely). The welding companies have outspent lawyers for the welders at a rate of about 24-to-1.
This investigation suggests that if somebody would spend more time and money, the workers would have a better chance to prove their cases. You are about to see that there is a long trail of evidence that there is something to be concerned about.
I am going to give you a longer-than-usual pull quote from this report because I suspect many of you will not click into the story itself unless you know how important it may be.
The Center for Public Integrity investigation says:
In the United States [in the late 1930s], the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed a welding-safety booklet describing manganese as an "important poison" that "causes a disease similar to paralysis agitans" -- Parkinson's. (The welding industry responded by demanding MetLife rewrite the booklet to tamp down the "scare" it had created; the insurer obliged.) In 1943, Occupational Hazards Inc. of Cleveland published an industrial-safety handbook warning of the metal�s paralyzing effects. "Manganese victims usually remain life-long cripples, unfit for gainful employment," the authors wrote. They encouraged employers to provide ventilation and examine workers four times a year "to detect early signs or symptoms."
Documents show that welding suppliers knew of the problems. In an October 1949 memo, an executive from Airco Welding Products ... recalled how the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, an industry trade group, had called for warning labels. "Some of the manufacturers did not do this and as a result immediately capitalized on the advantage of being able to sell an electrode which did not have to be marked 'poison,'" the official wrote. "As a result, one by one, all of the various manufacturers took this information off the label and all were very glad to get it off."
As evidence of the dangers mounted -- "the fumes are far worse than I had any reason to suspect," another Airco official wrote in 1950 -- the industry continued to resist warning labels. It wasn't until the 1990s that the warnings were made explicit. Today, one brand of welding wire bears this caution: "Overexposure to manganese and manganese compounds above safe exposure limits can cause irreversible damage to the central nervous system, including the brain."
Like other industries in the crosshairs of litigation, welding-rod manufacturers have zeroed in on the concept of "safe exposure limits." Manganese is toxic, they've acknowledged, but not at the levels present in their products. In fact, independent researchers have documented a range of symptoms in welders exposed to ordinary levels of the metal, from depression, memory loss and irritability to the zombielike state of full-blown manganism. Some get "cock walk" � a lurching, toe-heavy gait resembling that of a strutting rooster. A recent study described numbness (61 percent), tremors (42 percent), and hallucinations (19 percent) among 49 welders working on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
Epidemiologist Robert Park of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) says there's ample evidence that welding fumes wreak havoc on the brain.
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