Link between Vinyl Chloride and rare form of liver cancer
10 I 06 I 11
Our colleagues in the United States are
bringing successful claims on behalf of a number of former and
current employees of the chemical and plastic industry who have
become ill due to exposure to vinyl chloride, also known as vinyl
chloride monomer.
In 1974 The National
Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) concluded that
vinyl chloride was the prime candidate in producing angiosarcoma,
an extremely rare cancer of the liver. Vinyl chloride has also been
proven to cause cancer of the brain and lung.
Exposure to vinyl
chloride had previously been thought safe at 500 parts per million
parts of air. However, in its 1974 revised safety data sheet, NIOSH
were unable to describe a safe level of exposure and the concept of
a threshold limit for vinyl chloride gas in the atmosphere was
rejected. Consequently NIOSH recommended that where an employee was
exposed to any measurable concentration of vinyl
chloride, that employee must wear an air supplied respirator.
This has caused a heated
debate about whether the industry were aware that exposure to vinyl
chloride at 500 parts per million was unsafe well before 1974.
Vinyl chloride in liquid
form will have been sent from America to polymerisation plants in
the UK and it is highly probably that workers at those plants will
have been exposed it. Because of the limited awareness of the
link between vinyl chloride and angiosarcoma, there are likely to
be people suffering from this rare disease who do not realise that
their employment has caused their injury.
A number of
polymerisation plants in the UK are likely to have worked with
liquid form vinyl chloride including ICI plants and the Dow Corning
plant in Barry. If you or a member of your family were exposed to
vinyl chloride whilst working in the chemical and plastic industry
and want advice please call our Industrial Disease Team on 029 2022
4871 or email gareth.morgan@hughjames.com