A $3.1 million study to determine cancer rates of IBM employees is being designed to withstand the rigors of scientific review and pitfalls of public skepticism.
At least, that's the intention of its authors at the National Institute of Occupational Safety & Health. Officials at the federal agency are scheduling a meeting this fall to get feedback from peer review scientists to ensure details are technically sound. Community members and labor advocates will also be invited and encouraged to offer suggestions of their own.
The date and place are yet to be determined, although the meeting will be in the Triple Cities area, possibly in November.
"It's part of the attempt to involve workers and their representatives, friends and families," said Fred Blosser, a spokesman for NIOSH.
Wanda Hudak put it this way: "We're trying to bring the regular Joes to the table." Hudak is coordinator of a citizens group called the Western Broome Environmental Stakeholders Coalition, which works with health and environmental officials to understand environmental and health issues affecting Southern Tier communities.
The study, expected to take years, plans to tap 28,000 personnel files dating to the early 1960s that document the IBM work force at the microelectronics campus on North Street.
Researchers plan to cross-reference the IBM records with cancer and death records kept by state and federal government agencies to log the number of workers who developed cancer during their employment or any time after.
Researchers from the state Department of Health are seeing if it's also feasible to cross -reference the IBM files with records kept by the state to determine if children of women employed at the Endicott plant were more likely to suffer birth defects.
IBM is providing the employee files, along with information about what chemicals were used in various parts of the plant, now owned by Huron Real Estate Associates.
"IBM will continue to cooperate with NIOSH, just as we have done in the past," said IBM spokesman Michael Maloney. He could not say whether the company would have a representative at the fall meeting.
NIOSH officials said it is unlikely the study will provide a causal relationship between illness and exposure to a specific chemical, because so many different chemicals were used at the plant -- many of them known toxic substances and carcinogens. Nevertheless, documenting illnesses among workers is a critical starting point to fruitful discussions about worker safety, said Rick White, a labor advocate with Alliance@IBM, a labor group.
"It moves us into other areas of discussion," he said. "How do you keep it from happening in the future and where do we go from here? ... Without this discussion and information from the study, there's no place for health and safety anymore."
