BP Amoco Settles Five Former Employees' Cancer-Related Lawsuits

BP Amoco Corp. has settled five out of six lawsuits brought against it last year on behalf of employees who claimed they developed glioma, a rare form of brain cancer, after work-related exposures. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, and the company said it hopes to settle the sixth lawsuit soon.

Preliminary results of a three-year investigation conducted by the company and released last August suggested that occupational exposure may have contributed to at least 12 brain cancer tumors among chemical researchers at BP Amoco's Naperville, IL, research complex.

At least 20 employees at Naperville have developed brain tumors since BP Amoco opened the facility in 1970. Of those, 12 chemical researchers who worked in Naperville's Building 500 complex have developed primary intracranial tumors since 1986. Five of them worked on the same floor of the Building 503 wing, one of two research wings surrounding a core of offices in the complex. Five of the 12 have died.

Amoco reached a settlement agreement with one cancer-stricken employee who is still alive, and with the estates of four employees who died. Marios Karayannis, whose father, Nicholas, worked in building 503 and died of the rare brain cancer glioma, called the settlement amounts "fair."

After three researchers developed malignant brain tumors in 1996, BP Amoco plc (then Amoco Corp.) closed down the third floor of Building 503 and called in researchers from Johns Hopkins University and University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Public Health to investigate.

The team focused on the 1676 people who worked in the Building 500 complex. The study, however, stopped short of identifying the exact chemical or chemicals to blame for the outbreak, but the team did identify approximately 6000 chemicals that could have caused reactions. The study concluded that occupational exposure may have contributed to the 12 cancers, but could not finger a specific causative agent.

"It's very difficult with small number of cases involved for epidemiologists to determine if the tumors were work-related," says company spokesperson Vicki Kastory. "But we were able to find a number of clues."

In addition to the six people diagnosed with glioma, six other Building 500 researchers had benign intracranial tumors. These included two Schwannomas, two meningiomas, and two pituitary adenomas. The rest of the Naperville site had 13 benign intercranial tumors and one glioma. The Johns Hopkins-UAB study indicated that this is statistically average.

The Johns Hopkins-UAB team found no unusual patterns in work location, dates of employment, or work activities among people diagnosed with benign intracranial tumors or any cancers other than glioma. This suggests no other cancers are linked to work at the facility, although several other lawsuits from those employees and their families are still pending.

The lawsuits charge workers were exposed to numerous neurotoxins due to a faulty ventilation system. BP Amoco maintains that it used the best available technology and that it was regularly tested.

(For further information about the BP Amoco study, see Safety Online "Chemicals May Have Caused Brain Tumors at BP Amoco Naperville Complex, But Study Cannot Identify the Culprits.")

By Sandy Smith