Jim Morris, a seasoned investigative journalist from Texas and the founder of the nonprofit Public Health Watch, has a brand new (and scary) book about corporations concealing workplace hazards that literally kill their employees. The book opens with a longtime worker at a Goodyear plant in scenic Niagara Falls, NY who has just discovered blood in his urine—”sheets of it” —and soon learns that he and many union colleagues are all being diagnosed with deadly bladder cancer.
I first heard about this situation while doing this big chemical safety series in 1998 at the Houston Chronicle. I spent a year looking into vinyl chloride, which is one of the chemicals the Goodyear plant used in Niagara Falls for 50 years. But the bladder cancer death count then was not 78 like it is now.
I have been covering worker health and safety for much of my 46-year career, and many cases are murky: Did this worker’s exposure cause this particular worker’s cancer? This was such a thoroughly documented example of a specific chemical causing a very specific kind of cancer—the same type of cancer researchers had found in animals. Rarely do you see such a strong link.