Philippa Stevenson: PCP's victims deserve more than a study

COMMENT


'Someone checked the fish, but they never came to us."

I never forget that or the man who said it to me 12 years ago. He was a timber worker who had spent most of his life working with the anti-sapstain chemical pentachlorophenol, or PCP, and five years after he left the job had just found out about its dangers.

He got the information from me - a reporter investigating the environmental pollution of his old workplace, the Waipa timber mill at Rotorua.

In July 1992, a union official had given me his and another man's name. I was soon discussing with them a full-scale investigation of the mill - the most heavily PCP-contaminated site of possibly 400 nationwide - and the effect of the chemicals they'd used daily during their combined 27 years working there.

One man was 54. He'd had three heart attacks, was a chronic diabetic, often felt a burning sensation in his eyes and would have had a hip replacement were it not for a raging skin rash that doctors feared would stop the wound healing.

The other was 43, had partial sight after an accident with PCP, a painful back complaint, a persistent rash and frequently felt like he had acid searing his eyes.

They were stunned to learn that Government and industry officials were checking the condition of the soil and the fish but had not bothered to find out about the health of thousands of former workers.

Now, more than 10 years later someone is - again.

In a $520,000 Government-financed project administered by the Health Research Council, Massey University's Professor Neil Pearce will spend two years studying the health of former timber workers exposed to PCP.

Another study will look into long-term genetic effects.

But that's three years after a medical study of 62 former sawmill workers found PCP was the probable cause of health problems in about a third of them. It's four years since a union report on 79 timber workers found they may have been affected by exposure to PCP, 12 years since unionists started formally documenting workers' health problems, and 16 years since the timber industry stopped using PCP after its health and environmental effects were recognised.

PCP has been on the market since 1936 and the New Zealand sawmill industry quickly became one its heaviest users because of the predominance of radiata pine, a soft wood more susceptible than most to the sapstain fungi that PCP kills.

The PCP used here for more than 50 years was industrial grade, heavily contaminated with impurities, mostly dioxins - nasty disease-causing poisons that accumulate in the food chain, and can be stored in the body.

PCP's dangers were seldom highlighted to timber workers.

In one 90-page manual for a Waipa plant which infused timber with PCP under pressure, two sentences addressed safe handling, dismissively advising that PCP was toxic to humans but "with the proper precautions it may be handled with perfect safety".

One work safety official saw Waipa workers, wearing shorts and singlets, dripping in PCP as they hauled wet timber. They breathed in chemical fumes, contaminated dust and smoke.

The pressure plant blew up occasionally, one memorable time burning for seven days.

Workers had headaches, rashes and nausea, coughed up blood and passed it in their faeces.

Because they knew nothing of the effects of PCP exposure, they rarely related health problems to it, and neither did the company doctor, or their own GPs.

Their preference for seeing their own doctors meant company records showed little, and skin diseases diagnosed by GPs but not identified as work-related never figured on ACC or Health Department registers as required by law.

In May 1992, when the extent of the pollution at Waipa was made public, its owner, state-owned Forest Corp, set up a hotline for worried workers.

No one called. Instead, within a few days 75 workers, distrustful of the company, called their union, which immediately started to document the flood of health concerns.

But Government health officials checking on worker health in the 1990s consulted only company records and official registers before concluding there wasn't a problem.

They didn't check union records and they didn't ask about in closeknit communities for people who had worked with PCP.

Evidence has mounted over the years that former timber workers are suffering from the effects of PCP.

As Sawmill Workers Against Poisons representative Gwenda Monteith-Paul said this week, these men do not need more research to tell them what their health issues are, they need someone to help.

The people should have come before the fish in 1992. Easing their suffering should come before more research in 2004.

* Email Philippa Stevenson