3 families sue Rohm & Haas

Three more lawsuits were filed yesterday against Rohm & Haas Co. by the families of former employees with brain tumors, including one new patient whose case was not previously disclosed.

The new case is what's known as a "benign" tumor, though the patient, Martina Granger, suffered seizures until she underwent surgery in October and is now dealing with speech and language deficits, her attorney said.

That brings the tally of benign tumors to five among those who worked at the chemical company's main research facility, in Spring House, Montgomery County. At least a dozen other employees there have had fatal brain cancers.

In a complaint filed in the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia, Granger and her husband allege that the company did not take adequate steps to ventilate Building 4 - where she worked as a research chemist and archivist - and did not tell her of air-quality problems.

Similar allegations of negligence and fraud were made in the other two new lawsuits, filed on behalf of the families of brain-cancer victims Thomas Szerlik and Irving Adler.

The attorney in all three cases, Aaron Freiwald, said Szerlik and Adler also worked in Building 4; the company contends Szerlik worked elsewhere. A Rohm & Haas spokesman declined to comment on the specifics of the lawsuits, saying the company's attorneys had not seen them.

"We continue to believe that Spring House is a safe place to work," said the spokesman, Syd Havely. "And the company has been open and transparent in its epidemiological investigation."

Freiwald has one other case pending in Common Pleas court on behalf of a former employee who died of brain cancer, as well as two workers' compensation claims.

The new lawsuits came on the heels of a highly critical review of the company's efforts to study the cancers, written by epidemiologists at the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH). The critique, which Rohm & Haas posted on its Web site Tuesday, faulted the company's in-house research as incomplete and "perhaps methodologically unsound."

The company's research has found no link between the cancers and any workplace exposure to chemicals. Rohm & Haas initially told workers it had estimated the brain-cancer rate at Spring House to be twice the expected level; the company now says there is no statistically significant elevation.

But following the NIOSH review, the company decided to turn over the investigation to a yet-to-be identified external team of academic researchers.