Semiconductor Employees Suing IBM

An anonymous reader writes "According to the NYTimes's Bob Herbert, IBM has been killing its employees by exposure to dangerous chemicals - evidence is being offered by stricken employees that unusually large numbers of men and women who worked for the giant computer corporation over the past few decades have been dying prematurely."

Comments

Non-Registration Link

[sparkhead]

As usual....Same article without registration

Re:industry problem?

[nomadic]

For a while the company WAS the industry. Not too many computer manufacturing companies that have been around long enough to show these statistics.

List of chemicals (from memory)

[xyote]

Typical chemicals used back then as far as I can remember (unless my memory was affected) were; hydrofloric acid (maybe mixed with nitric acid so you would know if it splashed on you), arsenic and phosgene used as dopants, various solvents mostly zylene which is a known carcinogen (but you can buy it at Home Depot so it must be safe for you), acetone, and silane (methane with Si instead of C) which burns on contact with air to make silicon dioxide (glass).

Usual Media Hype?

[spineboy]

These things are usually statistical anomalies - of course if you gather a group of people w/ cancer it looks like they have a higher risk/rate - it's because of a SELECTION BIAS!. You need to look at ALL of the employees who worked with these chemicals.

2 If it is workplace related exposure, then the people exposed to it should generally come down with the SAME TYPE of cancers/diseases(e.g. radium watch makers all came down with bone tumors, aniline dye workers all came down with bladder cancer) . If someone has esophagous cancer (prob from smoking+drinking) and somebody else has a bone tumor and someone else has brain cancer then these things DON'T ADD UP.

We need to see a GOOD epidemiological investigation before IBM is accused of increasing the cancer risk in it's manufacturing divisions. These things are almost always related to
Selection bias