Thema: Presse: 12 with brain tumors tied to Rohm & Haas

12 with brain tumors tied to Rohm & Haas - A study, to be released, is to provide clues to the mystery.

By Tom Avril

Inquirer Staff Writer The two boys didn´t put it together at first, but there were signs that Wayne Kachelries, their father and hero, was dying.

In their Northeast Philadelphia basement, the boys started to beat him at Ping-Pong.

On the basketball court, their father, a former high school star, began to stumble.

And one day when the older son, also named Wayne, was about 10, he overheard some troubling news when answering a call meant for his mother:

Dad had passed out at work.

A deadly tumor, doctors soon discovered, was growing inside their father´s brain.

Next month, nearly 24 years after their father died, his sons hope to find out why. .

Twelve families of brain-tumor victims are looking for answers, both with curiosity and with reluctance at reliving the pain of old wounds.

All have one thing in common:

Their loved ones worked, or still work, at a complex of squat, beige buildings in Spring House, Montgomery County. These are the research labs of Rohm & Haas Co., the nation´s sixth-largest chemical maker.

Next month, the company plans to release a study examining whether the 12 employees got sick from chemical exposure on the job.

The review began in June last year. Company physicians said they knew of 10 brain-tumor cases at the time, out of the 6,000 chemists, lab technicians and support staff who have worked at Spring House during its 40-year history.

The physicians estimated that number of cases to be about twice what would be expected, given the rate of brain tumors in the general U.S. population.

Two more cases have been discovered since then.

Now, 22 researchers, statisticians and doctors are trying to solve the puzzle, digging through records, interviewing colleagues, crunching numbers.

Who worked in what lab?

Which chemicals, out of thousands, did they handle?

How did their exposure compare with that of employees who did not get sick?

The company declined to provide details about the 12 employees. But through interviews with relatives and coworkers, The Inquirer learned details about eight of the victims.

Common threads connect some of them; for example, at least four worked in or near a lab that developed pesticides - part of a company unit sold in 2001. At least five had similar kinds of tumors. Other cases appear, on the surface, unrelated.

The causes of brain tumors are not well-understood. Experts say such a study might yield clues but may well not produce a "smoking gun."

A few chemicals have been linked to brain tumors, but many of the findings could not be repeated by other researchers, said Melissa Bondy, an epidemiology professor at the University of Texas´ M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Bondy is not involved in the Rohm & Haas study.

"We don´t... know what causes brain tumors," Bondy said. "We just haven´t found it."

. Joan Szerlik awoke with a start.

Her husband, Tom, was getting dressed.

"Got to take the car in," he said. It was 2 a.m.

She tried to reason with him, to no avail. He drove the Chevrolet Lumina from their house in Levittown to a Newtown garage.

Sometime later he returned, confused, having been pulled over by a policeman.

It was only the latest sign that Tom Szerlik, a computer programmer, wasn´t his cheerful old self. He had become moody, sometimes aggressive.

A CAT scan in April 1993 revealed that a fast-growing tumor, glioblastoma, was pressing on his brain. He was dead a month later, at 58.

Not long afterward, Joan Szerlik got a call from Rohm & Haas requesting her husband´s medical records, she said. The reason: His case was unusual.

She didn´t hear anything further until last year - when the company announced the study.

Now, she and some other victims´ families wonder why something was not done sooner.

With all those cases, Szerlik wonders: "Wouldn´t it have struck somebody?"

.

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.

Tom Szerlik, who worked on the same hallway as the pesticide chemists, according to a coworker´s widow, died in 1993.

Robert Exner, 66, who spent most of his career in human resources but worked briefly in one of the labs years ago, according to one coworker, died in 2000.

Barry Lange, 50, who fell in love with chemistry as a child, conducting experiments in his Levittown bedroom, died this year. He invented polymers, pesticides and biocides at Spring House, and has more than 50 patents in his name.

A coworker of Lange´s in biocides - chemicals that kill bacteria in soaps, paints and other products - is dying now.

Still another current employee has a benign tumor that appears not to be growing.

Rohm & Haas says it did not conduct a study earlier because the number of cases did not seem high at first. The company did not learn of the cases as they occurred, partly due to delays in how 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."

For U.S. adults 20 to 64, the age range of most of the Rohm & Haas victims, the brain-cancer rate is 5.4 cases per 100,000 people per year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

An accounting of the rate at Spring House would require data on how long each of the 6,000 workers worked there. A few hundred people worked there in the 1960s; today there are about 1,000.

The company study, to be reviewed by outside experts, will not calculate the rate. For now, the focus is to see why people got sick. .

Cancer and Rohm & Haas: This isn´t the first time those words have been linked.

At Building Six, the company´s chemical plant in the Bridesburg section of Philadelphia, workers began dying of lung cancer in 1955.

The victims had been exposed to bis-chloromethyl ether (BCME), a contaminant in a process for making resins for water-treatment plants.

Company officials first suspected in 1962 that the number of lung cancers was abnormally high and consulted outside experts. In a 1967 study of BCME, lab mice died in large numbers after being exposed.

But workers were not told of potential problems with the chemical until 1971, and a U.S. Senate committee later scolded officials for the delay.

By 1975, by the company´s count, 27 had died from the exposure. An Inquirer investigation at the time found twice as many deaths among exposed workers.

The company denied wrongdoing but in 1986 agreed to pay more than $24 million to settle 22 individual lawsuits and a class-action suit on behalf of 50 former employees or survivors.

Things are different this time. So far, there is no evidence of a particular chemical culprit, and the company has been holding information sessions for workers and retirees.

Several victims´ families said they did not blame the company for the deaths. They just wish a study had been done sooner.

"You take a group of them [brain tumors], and they´re all coming out of the same place," said Dale Kachelries, Wayne´s younger son. "That should raise a red flag." .

Wayne Kachelries was a passionate scientist, sometimes poring over research at his dining-room table until midnight.

In the early 1970s, he began applying his scientific methods to a new subject: the tumor growing inside his head.

He became health conscious, reading about which foods to eat, what alternative medicines to take. Some days he would bring home a list of the latest warnings about toxic chemicals.

One might be risky above a certain level - say, one part per million. Another one, maybe two parts per million.

The young chemist would tell his family: "I´m pouring this stuff out of five-gallon jugs."

Kachelries had surgery in 1975, and doctors were able to remove much of the plum-sized lump inside his skull.

He regained some of his Ping-Pong skills. Though he could no longer run the basketball court without falling, a shadow of the player who had helped Northeast High reach the 1953 Public League finals, he drilled young Dale on fundamentals.

But the tumor grew back.

"The cancer kind of shut off systems in his brain like running down a circuit breaker," recalled his older son, Wayne.

Kachelries died in February 1980 at 44, not knowing what killed him. Nearly 24 years later, his sons still do not know.

Until, they hope, next month.


Posted on Sun, Dec. 28, 2003