ExposureBlog

The Plaintiffs in this series of trials think so.  Former Corpus Christi welder Ernest J. Solis is the plaintiff in a trial being held in Cleveland.  His is one of 3,800 other lawsuits regarding Parkinsonism and welding fumes that have been consolidated in federal court there.  The toxin alleged to cause the Parkinsonism is manganese, an element occasionally found in welding fume–and, oddly enough, nuclear fallout.  Manganese is certainly a neurotoxin, but the symptoms it produces are fairly specific and don’t always correlate with classic Parkinsonism. According to Leikin and Paloucek, in the well-regarded (by me anyway) Poisoning and Toxicology Compendium, manganese-toxic patients “have a tendency to fall backwards, not have a prominent tremor and do NOT respond well to dopaminomimetic medication as opposed to idiopathic parkinsonism patients.” I’m betting one of the experts for the defense in this case will be Denver physician Scott D. Phillips.  He wrote an article in Greenbergs Occupational, Industrial and Environmental Toxicology, in which he had this to say about manganese: “Symptoms (of manganese exposure) are typical of parkinsonism. However, the brain lesions from manganese occur in the striatum and palladium in distinction to parkinsonism, in which the substantia nigra is damaged.”  He cites A Barbeau et al, “Role of manganese in dystonia,” Adv Neurol. 14:339, 1976.  Damage to the striatum and palladium is something that, presumably, can be differentiated from damage to the substantia nigra.

Then there’s the issue of naturally-occuring manganese in the environment.  For example, an average cup of tea may contain 2-7 ppm of manganese.

Making matters even more difficult for the Plaintiffs, the conditions of exposure to welding fume are going to be difficult to quantify years after the fact, especially when there may be no clear record of the specific types of welding rods that were used over the time period.  I can imagine the request for production: “all invoices for welding rods going back to 1960, all industrial hygiene monitoring results from 1970 to the present. . .”

Of course, I haven’t seen the court documents, but if the Plaintiff is asserting that welding rods -> manganese -> Parkinsonism in the welder, then it might be a tough case to make.

Prediction: 8:4 Defendant.