ExposureBlog

Broadband, here.

The Plaintiffs in this series of trials think so.  Former Corpus Christi welder Ernest J. Solis is the plaintiff in a trial being held in Cleveland.  His is one of 3,800 other lawsuits regarding Parkinsonism and welding fumes that have been consolidated in federal court there.  The toxin alleged to cause the Parkinsonism is manganese, an element occasionally found in welding fume–and, oddly enough, nuclear fallout.  Manganese is certainly a neurotoxin, but the symptoms it produces are fairly specific and don’t always correlate with classic Parkinsonism. According to Leikin and Paloucek, in the well-regarded (by me anyway) Poisoning and Toxicology Compendium, manganese-toxic patients “have a tendency to fall backwards, not have a prominent tremor and do NOT respond well to dopaminomimetic medication as opposed to idiopathic parkinsonism patients.” I’m betting one of the experts for the defense in this case will be Denver physician Scott D. Phillips.  He wrote an article in Greenbergs Occupational, Industrial and Environmental Toxicology, in which he had this to say about manganese: “Symptoms (of manganese exposure) are typical of parkinsonism. However, the brain lesions from manganese occur in the striatum and palladium in distinction to parkinsonism, in which the substantia nigra is damaged.”  He cites A Barbeau et al, “Role of manganese in dystonia,” Adv Neurol. 14:339, 1976.  Damage to the striatum and palladium is something that, presumably, can be differentiated from damage to the substantia nigra.

Then there’s the issue of naturally-occuring manganese in the environment.  For example, an average cup of tea may contain 2-7 ppm of manganese.

Making matters even more difficult for the Plaintiffs, the conditions of exposure to welding fume are going to be difficult to quantify years after the fact, especially when there may be no clear record of the specific types of welding rods that were used over the time period.  I can imagine the request for production: “all invoices for welding rods going back to 1960, all industrial hygiene monitoring results from 1970 to the present. . .”

Of course, I haven’t seen the court documents, but if the Plaintiff is asserting that welding rods -> manganese -> Parkinsonism in the welder, then it might be a tough case to make.

Prediction: 8:4 Defendant.

From pre-owned body parts.  Worse, there’s currently few federal regulations protecting the consumer. This AP article, appearing on the MSNBC site, tells how you can protect yourself somewhat.

As someone who has both a PC and a Mac, I’ve used Stuffit for years.  Stuffit is a little utility that does two things very well: it compresses files and it decompresses folders and files.  Stuffit is great if you have to send a big group of files to a client—put em all in a folder, compress it with Stuffit and then email.  Very easy.  For years Stuffit was made by a company named Alladin Software.  So I was a little surprised when I received a Stuffit upgrade offer from a company named Allume.  Well, generally, upgrades are a good thing, so I sprung for the $19.95, downloaded the zip file and installed it.  Except. . .I had to first UNinstall my trusted earlier edition. 

So I did.  Then I discovered that the new Stuffit (version 9), um. . .didn’t really work on my machine.  Given a file to decompress, Stuffit would churn for minutes and minutes and the result was an empty folder.  I tried using it on earlier stuffed files and the same thing happened.  Now, as someone who archives a lot of documents, this was not good. 

I went to the Allume site and discovered that they are actually a company called Smith Micro.  That was both news and a weird coincidence.  Back in the mid-90s there was a great program called Hotline. All it did was catalog phone numbers.  Click on the number and the phone would dial (via the modem.) Very cool and essential to anyone who uses the phone a lot.  When Windows 3.1 showed up, Hotline came out with a Windows version.   Then, for reasons unknown, they vanished off the planet.  The company that made Hotline was named Smith Micro. 

So, did my old friend Smith Micro sell me a copy of Stuffit that didn’t well, unstuff?  Maybe, but not likely.  Regardless, I unloaded the new, helpless version of Stuffit and reinstalled my old version 8–which I had bought at Microcenter a few years ago.

Now, Stuffit 9 might work on some computers, but it didn’t on mine.  And if I hadn’t kept the old CD of version 8. . .well, I guess I would be trolling the “Stuffit 9 help forums” looking for answers.  Not a good way to spend company time.

Couple of morals here: 

1. Just because it’s an upgrade doesn’t mean it’s better,
2. Beware when a software company changes names
3. Beware when there’s no phone number for tech support–only support forums.
4. Always keep an installable copy of your software on a CD.

A young woman enters a hospital to give birth, gets an epidural and dies.  The hospital denies any wrongdoing, but there seems to be a lot of evidence to the contrary.  Read the article and decide for yourself.  I’m also including a link to RID, Reduce Infection Deaths.  Worth looking at.

Mountain flying.

Story here. The suspect drugs are in a class called ACE inhibitors.  Additionally, new research now suggests that the antidepressant Paxil may cause birth defects if taken during the first trimester.

Read about it here. 

There’s not much toxic or nuke exposure portrayed on television.  The one’s that got it absolutely right–The Day After and Special Bulletin come to mind–are are usually so right that it scares everyone out of watching them.  Which, sociologically speaking, is probably worth talking about—but some other time.  This post is just going to set the stage a little bit, as it were. 

Back in 1989 when I was in the then-USSR, officials there told me that The Day After was instrumental in forming Gorbachev’s position vis a vis the U.S.  As for Special Bulletin, if you want to know what terrorists can really do with even a small nuke, this is your film.  The writer and director should have been given emmys for this one.

Maybe they did get emmys, I forgot.  Anyhow, Special Bulletin was written by Marshall Herskovitz, who seemed to have a knack for getting the emotions right in his screenplays.  Among his other projects, 1976’s Family and 1987’s Thirtysomething.  Special Bulletin was directed by Herskovitz’ pal Edward Zwick who had a hand in the aforementioned Herskovitz projects as well as the great 1990’s series “My So-Called Life.”  It lasted one season.  Like Special Bulletin, maybe a little too realistic.

Which is perhaps why the current scriptwriters add that little dose of unreality to the program so that viewers will know that it’s all well, make believe.  Take that new CBS show scheduled for the fall lineup–Jericho.  From the press release it’s about the citizens of a small Kansas town who witness an explosion that resembles a nuclear test and because of it’s remote location (the town, not the explosion) the citizens have difficulty figuring out what to do next.  Sort of like Lost on the Great Plains. Or maybe not.

The fact is, I like CBS, mostly because Dan Rather and Fern Orenstein work there.  But, as a guy who knows a mushroom cloud when I see one, the cloud in the promo needs serious work.  It actually looks worse than the one in the really sensitive and too-cleverly-titled Desert Bloom, that old Jon Voight movie about coming-of-age and nuclear testing. 

But back to Jericho: there’s the problem with the terrain—there are mountains visible on the horizon.  I grew up in the Midwest and having spent a lot of time in Kansas I can assure you that Kansas is awesomely flat.  In fact, it has actually been mathematically proven to be flatter than a pancake.  I’ve been all across that state and I know of no place in KS where there are mountains as tall as are depicted in that promo.   Colorado, yes.  Southern California, suspiciously, yes.  Kansas?  No.

So, Fern–remember me?  I was the guy sitting next to you on the plane to San Fran—you were wearing that black MGM tee shirt. 

Place a call to CBS Television Marketing. Ask if the ”tweak” designer on that team has ever spent any time in the Midwest.

Jericho sounds like a great script, one of those shows that could turn out to be another Lost—but those mountains in that promo have got to go. 

My good friend and former DOE safety guy/motorcycle maven Gary Noss sends along two great articles on how to lift a motorcycle that has fallen over, here and here.  I used to ride one and will likely do it again, so for me anyway, this is timely.