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posted by n1 on Sunday June 18 2017, @02:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the never-met-a-problem-we-couldn't-solve-by-outsourcing dept.

Results in epidemiology often are equivocal, and money can cloud science (see: tobacco companies vs. cancer researchers). Clear-cut cases are rare. Yet just such a case showed up one day in 1984 in the office of Harris Pastides, a recently appointed associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

A graduate student named James Stewart, who was working his way through school as a health and safety officer at Digital Equipment Corp., told Pastides there had been a number of miscarriages at the company's semiconductor plant in nearby Hudson, Mass. Women, especially of childbearing age, filled an estimated 68 percent of the U.S. tech industry's production jobs, and Stewart knew something few outsiders did: Making computer chips involved hundreds of chemicals. The women on the production line worked in so-called cleanrooms and wore protective suits, but that was for the chips' protection, not theirs. The women were exposed to, and in some cases directly touched, chemicals that included reproductive toxins, mutagens, and carcinogens. Reproductive dangers are among the most serious concerns in occupational health, because workers' unborn children can suffer birth defects or childhood diseases, and also because reproductive issues can be sentinels for disorders, especially cancer, that don't show up in the workers themselves until long after exposure.

Digital Equipment agreed to pay for a study, and Pastides, an expert in disease clusters, designed and conducted it. Data collection was finished in late 1986, and the results were shocking: Women at the plant had miscarriages at twice the expected rate. In November, the company disclosed the findings to employees and the Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group, and then went public. Pastides and his colleagues were heralded as heroes by some and vilified by others, especially in the industry.

As the effects of the chemicals used in chip manufacturing became known, production was shifted to South Korea where the problems continued.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Sunday June 18 2017, @03:20PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Sunday June 18 2017, @03:20PM (#527483) Journal

    It's scary how unconcerned industry was/is about disposing of toxic waste. On long island we have numerous superfund sites thanks to our strong aerospace industry that thrived until the wall fell. Plus plenty of other manufacturing industries that produced wastes. TCE a.k.a. Triclor, is a very popular solvent used in cleaning processes of many aerospace metal parts. TCE along with other toxic wastes were stored it in drums that eventually leaked and some dug a lagoon and dumped toxic waste right into them like the earth was a toilet. Think of the worst liquid waste and then dump it into an unlined pond. That's how they did it. Plus crooked waste disposal facilities who secretly buried toxic waste in dumps or land fills to make extra money. Some shops dumped into storm drains. They knew what they were doing but just didn't give a fuck because money.

    The worst site is called the Grumman/Navy Site. It's a ground water plume that has been spreading from the former manufacturing site. You cant drink the well water in the plume. The county has had to lay pipes to bring water into the homes near by in order to deliver safe drinking water and get them off well water. Think about that, the ground water is now full of toxic waste and undrinkable. The burden on the tax payer is incredible.

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