Headlines
A Familiar Story
12/20/2007
Many employees of another Rohm and Haas plant die of brain cancer
By KEVIN P. CRAVER
kcraver@nwherald.com
SPRING HOUSE, Pa. – Former Rohm and Haas executive Tom Haag likes to joke that "the good old days" rarely were – that people don’t actually remember good times, but good people found along the way.
And he worked with some good ones, he said as he leisurely drove around Rohm and Haas’ sprawling Spring House Technical Center, a research facility that the company began building in 1963 about 30 miles north of its Philadelphia world headquarters.
Names came to him on an unusually warm November morning as he drove by Building 4, one of the research buildings on the sprawling college-like campus. Haag remembers the employees of one hallway in particular.
Its occupants included chemist Barry Lange, popular and well-liked among his co-workers. Across the hallway was chemist Irv Adler, and lab technician Jay Ruth, Haag said. Around the corner was chemist Charles Hsu, and about 75 feet down the hallway from Adler sat Tom Szerlik, who modeled new molecules on his computer.
Haag, 72, knew some of them and had never known others. But their names are indelibly etched in his memory.
Every last one of them died of brain cancer. But they are only the victims in one hallway of one building.
At least 10 more brain cancer cases besides the five in the hallway of Building 4 have been linked to Rohm and Haas employees at Spring House. Haag and the victims – in most cases their next of kin – have been waiting years for answers.
"If you have two buildings where people died of brain cancer, and five of them died in the same hallway, you’ve got a problem," Haag said.
Connections
The story of Spring House might sound familiar to anyone following the McCullom Lake brain cancer lawsuits. In the two cases, the same company stands accused of causing brain cancers, the same company disavows any culpability, and in both cases, the epidemiology studies that clear the company’s name face allegations of dubious scientific merit from critics and the media.
Also in both cases, the plaintiffs have the same attorney. A year before Aaron Freiwald sued Rohm and Haas on behalf of McCullom Lake residents, he sued the company to start a medical-monitoring program for Spring House workers.
"Similarities are subtle, I think, but significant in these two cases," Freiwald said. "I would say that one of the issues that comes up in both is corporate responsibility."
The Spring House and McCullom Lake lawsuits also share one vital common denominator – Tom Haag, the retired corporate executive. Had Haag not persuaded Freiwald to sue the $8.2 billion company, the attorney’s name would never have come to the attention of McCullom Lake brain cancer patients Kurt Weisenberger and Bryan Freund, who were searching for an attorney willing to take their case.
Rohm and Haas defends its studies of the Spring House brain cancers, which conclude that the complex is safe.
Haag had no issues with his treatment during his 30-plus years with Rohm and Haas.
When the untimely death of his father sapped the family’s savings and stymied his hopes of attending college, Haag worked at Rohm and Haas for two years as a lab assistant. He joined the Army for two years to take advantage of the GI Bill, the company hired him back, and Haag attended night school at LaSalle University, earning a chemistry degree seven years later.
Hiring Haag was a profitable decision for the company. Haag is credited with inventing acrylic latex semi-gloss house paint, a creation that by his calculations brings in $100 million in sales a year.
He worked his way up to corporate development director and retired in 1991 after 38 years on the job, just before his 56th birthday. The package offered by Rohm and Haas made Haag a millionaire, and he planned to spend the rest of his days with his wife, Dot, at a four-bedroom New Jersey shore home, playing with his grandchildren and watching the lights of Atlantic City."
But while Haag worked his way up from Spring House and floated out on a golden parachute, his co-workers were dying. And when he realized the extent, Haag’s plans for a quiet and uneventful retirement would come to an end.
Dead and Dying
Joan Szerlik woke up in April 1993 to the sound of her husband, Tom, taking a shower.
Tom wanted to get the family car into the shop early, Joan remembered as she sat in the Levittown, Pa., house that she has lived in for almost 50 years. Tom’s decision didn’t make sense – it was 2 a.m. – but her husband was adamant, Joan said.
He didn’t get far. A police officer pulled him over for driving erratically and followed him home. But that was only the start to a bizarre and fateful day.
At breakfast, Tom became less and less coherent. He left to talk to his neighbor, who called Joan several minutes later.
"She called and said: ‘There's something wrong. He’s just not making sense,’" Joan said.
Joan got her husband back in the house and called an ambulance.
Doctors diagnosed Tom with glioblastoma multiforme, a malignant and deadly brain cancer with very low prospects for survival. Doctors could remove only some of it, and they gave Tom a matter of months to live.
Care workers suggested putting Tom in a nursing home. Joan would have none of that. She bought a medical bed and put it in their living room next to their picture window, and she slept on the couch next to him.
On a pleasant evening a month after Tom’s diagnosis, Joan got him into a lounge chair outside. He expressed his desire to visit Islamorada in the Florida Keys – they had visited there once and loved it. She promised a trip once he was well enough to travel.
"Believe me, you get through this and fight like I know you do, and I’ll get you to Islamorada," Joan told her husband. She paused. "He looked at me and said: ‘Not this time, babe. It’s too big.’"
Tom Szerlik died several days later, on Mother’s Day, at age 58, leaving behind Joan and two grown sons.
Wayne Kachelries Jr. spent a decade watching his father, a synthesis chemist at Spring House, wither and die. He and his brother began suspecting that something was wrong in the early 1970s, when they started beating their father in sports.
Kachelries was a chemist who would create polymers and then take them to Haag, who would figure out commercial applications for them. The men were friends, in part because of their similar life experiences – they were about the same age, both had two children, and both put themselves through night school.
Kachelries was diagnosed with glioma. The cancer took its time to end his life.
His son said surgery in 1975 helped him regain some of his momentum, but the tumor grew back. Kachelries died in 1980 at age 44.
An Old Friend
In August 1996, five years into his retirement, Haag read in The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Wall Street Journal that Amoco was closing a research laboratory in Naperville, Ill., in the wake of a rash of brain cancer cases among its chemists. He remembered Kachelries and the terrible fate that befell him.
"He was a great guy, and I had to watch him degenerate into a Frankenstein monster, with a bald head with big scars on it, stumbling around," Haag said. "[The cancer] took 10 years to kill him, and that made a strong impression on me."
Haag wrote a letter to Phil Lewis, the company’s medical director, and a man he knew on a first-name basis, according to Haag and the Spring House lawsuits. He enclosed the newspaper articles and asked two questions: Did Kachelries work with the same kinds of materials as the Amoco chemists, and did he die of the same brain cancer?
"I ended it with a great sentence. ‘By receipt of this letter, I take this troublesome thought off my back, and put it on yours,’" Haag said.
Lewis responded in quick order, promising to have company epidemiologist Arvind Carpenter look into it and have him contact his counterpart at Amoco, according to Haag and the lawsuits filed.
Haag heard nothing back. He returned to his idyllic retired life, assuming that his concerns were unfounded.
Something Amiss
Rohm and Haas has had problems with alleged cancer clusters before. The company created its epidemiology department in the wake of more than 60 lung cancer deaths at its facility in nearby Bridesburg, Pa., dating to the 1960s. Although Rohm and Haas denied wrongdoing, it paid more than $24 million in 1986 to settle 22 individual lawsuits and a class-action lawsuit.
The company found itself in a similar situation in 2002, the year after Lange, the well-liked polymer chemist, fell ill with glioblastoma multiforme shortly after leaving Rohm and Haas for a job at Johnson & Johnson.
Lange’s illness prompted management to get to the bottom of why Lange – and by their tentative count at the time, at least nine others – contracted brain cancer. Rohm and Haas’ medical services director wrote a letter to current and former Spring House employees, inviting them to a meeting to outline the upcoming epidemiology study.
The letter upset Haag. After all, he wrote the company six years before to warn them that something might not be right.
In Levittown, Joan Szerlik got the same letter. The walls began to close in.
"I couldn’t breathe for a couple of minutes; it was like somebody hit me in the gut," she said. "It was like, ‘No, no, Lord, don’t tell me this happened, that he shouldn’t have gone.’"
About 100 employees attended the June 2002 presentations by Carpenter, the corporate epidemiologist. He promised that the first study, a case-control study to pinpoint the causes of the brain cancers, would be finished by December 2003, and that it would be reviewed by an independent outside panel.
Haag said he pounced when the presentation ended and Carpenter opened the floor to questions.
Haag stood up and asked Carpenter the question he posed in his letter to Lewis, one of the questions that Lewis promised that Carpenter would look into: Did Wayne Kachelries die of the same cancer that the Amoco researchers in Naperville contracted?
Carpenter did not recognize Kachelries’ name, Haag said. Haag then asked Carpenter whether he had ever spoken to the Amoco epidemiologist. The answer was no.
"The paper said I was disturbed," Haag said of media coverage of the presentation. "I was fuming."
Haag started calling former Spring House co-workers to check up on them. And one brain cancer at a time, a nightmare emerged. Chemist Irv Adler? Died in 1980. Assistant Jay Ruth? Died in 1986. Robert Exner, a human resources employee whose offices for a time were next to the labs? Died in 2003.
A month or so later, Haag got a call from chemist Charles Hsu, who had followed the news media coverage and who worked around the corner from Lange. Haag said Hsu was hard to follow – he kept drifting between English and his native Chinese – but he made it clear to Haag that he, too, had brain cancer.
"I started hearing, ‘Well, he died of brain cancer, and geez, I think he died of brain cancer,’" Haag said. "By the time I got off the phone, there was smoke pouring out of it, and I said damn, I think there’s a real problem at Spring House."
Haag said he made a promise to himself that he openly shared with his former fellow executives – he would not sit idly by while the study progressed.
Coincidence
The company informed Spring House workers in a Dec. 10, 2003, letter that Carpenter had finished the study and would present its findings the following January.
Spring House employees, or their next of kin, packed the facility’s auditorium to standing room only, attendees said. Despite his misgivings, Haag had a cautious optimism – he had met with Carpenter before his falling out with his former employer.
"I came away with a generally favorable impression of Carpenter in that he seemed like a scientist," Haag said. "I have a lot of faith in scientists. I used to be one."
Joan Szerlik was less optimistic.
"I went in there thinking this was going to be the biggest cover-up ever," she said.
Margaret Skalski, whose husband died of glioblastoma multiforme in 1990, didn’t know what to think. She and her son managed to get in, even though she had not received an invitation – Stanley worked at the company facility in Bridesburg, not Spring House. But she remembered her husband’s stories of mixing buckets of leather chemicals, and his work clothes, which would disintegrate every few months.
"My son and I went to this meeting, and I didn’t think they thought we were going to get too involved," Skalski said. "But they were very much mistaken."
Carpenter shared the front stage with two of the three outside experts who made up the study’s independent review panel. The study concluded that no links were found between the chemicals at Spring House and the 15 cases of cancers that they researched. In short, the data indicated that the illnesses were coincidence.
"Spring House," Carpenter said to both the employees and to the news media, "is a safe place to work."
Carpenter promised that the case control study would be published in a peer-reviewed journal later that year. Realizing that the findings would not ease employees’ concerns, Carpenter also promised a second study, called a cohort mortality study, to research all deaths of Spring House employees, that he predicted would be finished by the end of 2006.
Haag said he was furious beyond words at the results.
"How the hell do you say that when five guys die in the same hallway, four of them from glioblastoma multiforme?" Haag asked.
Szerlik said she had her opinion reinforced – the company had answered exactly as she had predicted. And Skalski made up her mind – she said the fact that Rohm and Haas conducted the study in-house doomed it from the start.
"How can anyone call that an unbiased study? It was paid for by Rohm and Haas," Skalski said. "I don’t care who they brought in."
Requests to interview Carpenter and Lewis, the corporate medical director, were declined by Rohm and Haas spokesman Syd Havely and Ralph Wellington, an attorney with Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis, which is representing Rohm and Haas in both the Spring House and McCullom Lake lawsuits.
Questions Arise
The company has remained somewhat tight-lipped about the litigation. But Rohm and Haas has defended the study’s conclusions.
"There is no doubt that Rohm and Haas stands behind that," Wellington said. "It was carefully done, it’s been reviewed, and the company is very comfortable with how it was done."
Since suing Rohm and Haas, Freiwald has obtained much about the epidemiology study and deposed Carpenter, the corporate epidemiologist, for three days. What Freiwald discovered, he says, discredits Rohm and Haas’ conclusions.
Carpenter testified that he examined the reported cancers against the 6,000 or so employees who ever worked at Spring House, despite the fact that the cancers were disproportionately high based on career and office location. The test population included summer interns, groundskeepers and other vocations.
"If you’re going to include the people who worked in the mail room as well as the people who worked in the chemical labs, you’re going to dilute the significance of the cancer cases, particularly when you don’t have any brain cancer cases among the people who worked in the mail room. You don’t have any brain cases among people who were there as summertime help," Freiwald said.
Furthermore, Freiwald said, a worker raking leaves would not have nearly the exposure that the chemists do.
"The brain cancer cases occurred among the people who worked in the chemistry lab buildings. Period," Freiwald said. "And most of them occurred in Building 4. Some of them occurred on the same hallway. That was never looked at."
And critics such as Haag and Freiwald allege that the company’s research pared down the number of cases while increasing the total population included in the study. One of the reasons that brain cancer clusters are hard to prove is that brain cancer is too rare to be statistically significant, said Dr. Beverly Kingsley, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, an employee had to be permanently assigned to Spring House to be counted in the study. That left out victim Charles Hart, a leather chemist and marketer who died of glioblastoma multiforme in 1976. Although his office was at corporate headquarters in Philadelphia, he spent so much time at Spring House that he moved to be closer to it, Freiwald said.
Hart’s assistant, Olivia Ranalli, also was assigned elsewhere but spent many days at Spring House before leaving the company in 1980. She was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme after the study and died earlier this year.
"What the game can be in epidemiology is: ‘Let’s blow this up and get such big numbers, large numbers, and we’ll throw this on top of the logic, and no one will notice. We’ll dilute the results by including everyone we can think of, and exclude some others,’ " Haag said.
In the lawsuits, Freiwald also accuses Rohm and Haas of assembling a biased review panel, because all three members had links to the corporate officials involved in the study. One member, for example, was on Carpenter’s doctoral dissertation panel at the University of Alabama.
Another, epidemiologist Elizabeth Ward, had worked with Carpenter at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. She was the one missing from the stage when Carpenter released the study’s findings in January 2004. But there was more to the reason for her absence.
Carpenter had given her information to review during the Christmas holiday before the presentation, Ward said. She did not receive a full report, but rather PowerPoint slides. Ward said she had told Carpenter that she could not endorse the study and resigned from the panel – in part due to the lack of information and in part due to the time requirements of her new job.
"I was basically saying that before I could give an opinion on the final methods of the results, I would need a full report to review," Ward said.
Rohm and Haas spokesman Brian McPeak said Ward’s decision does not lessen the integrity of the study.
"I don’t think that changes the effort we made with good science and good epidemiology work, and we still stand 100 percent behind that work, and all the work on the Spring House issue," McPeak said.
Present Day
Freiwald sued Rohm and Haas to create a medical-monitoring program for all current and former Spring House workers. He also sued on behalf of Ranalli’s widower, and to recoup workers’ compensation for the families of Lange and Hsu.
But his medical-monitoring lawsuit hit a snag – a Pennsylvania court ruled earlier this year that although employees are entitled to medical monitoring, there is no existing provision for class-action lawsuits in the state’s workers’ compensation laws. Therefore, if all 6,000 Spring House workers want medical monitoring at this time, they have to bring their claims individually.
Freiwald’s lawsuits on behalf of the three families have survived motions to dismiss. Freiwald said that more plaintiffs are coming, and he continues to subpoena more information on the Spring House cases.
Haag, Freiwald and others also are awaiting the publication of the first study in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which Carpenter had said would be done by the end of 2004. Havely said both studies – the case control and the cohort mortality – will be published simultaneously once the cohort mortality study is ready for publication.
McPeak said last week that the cohort mortality study is complete and that it is undergoing final review by another outside panel. He also said its conclusions reinforce the answer reached by the 2003 case control study.
But Barry Lange and Charles Hsu won’t get whatever final answers the studies, or their families’ lawsuits, provide. Lange succumbed to his cancer in 2003 at age 50. Hsu died last July at age 59.
Haag still works to keep Spring House, and its former employees with brain cancer, in the headlines. He has self-published a book, "Mox Nix," a fictional account of a large chemical corporation dealing with workplace-related deaths, inspired by Rohm and Haas’ lung cancer deaths in Bridesburg.
He called his public-relations campaign a last resort after numerous attempts to fix the problem at the corporate level.
"I tried to work on this problem from within the corporation, but I was lied to, given the runaround, stalled and brushed off," Haag said. "And I don’t brush off easily."
Havely offered a grudging respect for Haag and " ... his authentic concern for current and former employees at Spring House." And it was that tenacity that Freiwald credits in part for his taking the case, along with Haag’s warning to his former employers in 1996, the company’s in-house epidemiology study, and other factors.
"When I put all that together, I felt there might be some more to the story that had not been revealed yet," Freiwald said. "And several hundred thousand pages of documents later, I believe that even more strongly."
McPeak said last week that the Rohm and Haas facility presents no danger to its employees.
"We still believe the Spring House facility is a safe place to work," McPeak said.
Regardless of what Rohm and Haas’ studies conclude, the next of kin interviewed by the Northwest Herald said they would never believe that the cancers were a quirk of fate.
Although they never met by virtue of their workplaces, Stan Skalski and Tom Szerlik both were uneasy with what they were being exposed to, their widows said.
Joan Szerlik remembers a dinnertime conversation with Tom several years before his death. He was not his cheerful self. After some prodding, Tom revealed what was on his mind.
"‘I hate where my office is. I don’t like being next to those labs. Funny things go on in those labs,’" Joan remembered Tom saying. "‘I don’t like what I smell, and I don’t like what I hear.’"
"Evidently, his instincts were right."