Tobacco Documents Online

I - RADIO 11IREPaRTS TRANSCRIPT FOR PROGRAM DATE SUSlECT BROADCAST EXCERPT FORREST SAWYER (HOST): For the past six months, Day One has been investigating a violent sickness that strikes thousands of people every year. Now if this.happened in a city or a suburb, it would be cause for hysteria, but the victims here have little money or power. They are people who work in tobacco fields and generations of tobacco workers have had to accept the fact that a terrible illness goes hand in hand with the work they do and no one's paid much attention -- until now. Here's John Martin. JOHN MARTIN (REPORTER): Harvest season in America's tobacco belt. B.J. Childress is 12 years old. Like many children in this region, he cuts tobacco, and like his friends, he sometimes get sick. He passed out cutting tobacco last year. B.J. CHILDRESS (TOBACCO CUTTER): I thought I was going to die for a minute. I believe it was tobacco poisoning, but I don't know. MARTIN: The first time that happened, B.J. was just seven years old. All through the tobacco belt, children and adults are helping bring in the crops and many of them, young and old, have no idea what awaits them. JACKIE SCOTT (TOBACCO WORKER): It's a sickness that you can hardly describe. You think you're dying. . RON SCOTT (TOBACCO WORKER): Your legs want to give way because you've strained, you've dry heaved. JACKIE: I threw up so much that it had ruptured the my stomach. You just think you're dying. PHILIP MORRIS DAY ONE N~ rerkr 212.309 1400 Chlcayet 312 5A 12020 DaMaib 3L3-31] 1177 Los Any.l.sa 213•bba?. waohinaeon. C.C.i 301.a5a 4068 8es/au e17.53a•223T Philadaphim 215-5G77600 Son F.anciues 213J6Qd121 Miomi& 30S358J358 STATION' WABC-TV & THE ABC TV NETWORK CITY NEW YORK 11/22/93 8:30 P.M. AUDIENCE NICOTINE POISONING lining in WIwS. Rado TV R.qoea .nd.wors lo a.w.. tlr aca.acr of'.auial wppb.d by i1,11 aen~a be i.apo.ui64.Ior wido4.a or owis.ion.. AAalm iol suppG.d by Ro"TV Repona.wy 6. w.d ior 61. sed n6.nea pwpos.. anllr. r.wy na b. Wodac.d. wW « puhGcly dsnwnn.ai.d « shi-a .d.

MARTIN: The illness had been a mystery for as long as anyone could remember. Then 20 years ago, a public health official in No~th Carolina decided to investigate this tobacco sickness. DR. STEPHEN GEHLBACH (U MASS SCHOOL~ OF PUBLIC HEALTH): Physicians who worked out in the tobacco regions had seen it when we started asking them about it, and we were quite stunned at their lack of curiosity about what was going on. It really was an accepted part of the culture. MARTIN: At first, Dr. Gehlbach investigated the theory widely held that pesticides were to blame, but he found little evidence of that. He did discover something curious. The sickness got more noticeable after rainfalls. DR. GEHLBACH: I can remember very distinctly one day when a group of us who were working on this kind of sat around back at the office and started really scratching our heads and saying, "You know, there's something else going on out there. This is not pesticide poisoning. There's another phenomenon. There's another disease going on out there that causes people to get sick." MARTIN: Then Gehlbach began to suspect that the plant itself was producing a poison, a poison that turned to liquid in the rain or morning dew, a poison with a very familiar name -- nicotine. DR. GEHLBACH: It's hard to imagine that there's any other occupation where as many people get sick on the job in as short a period of time and something isn't done about it. MARTIN: Tobacco harvesters had been absorbing nicotine through their skin, a fact later verified by researchers who tested the body fluids of sick workers. Dr. Gehlbach's study, conducted in 1973, was published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association. He thought something would be done about it. DR. GEHLBACH: we really thought we were on to something here, that we had found a disease that basically hadn't been acknowledged, described before, and there was almost no interest that seemed to come from any of the media, the medical profession, anywhere. MARTIN: On the 20th anniversary of Dr. Gehlbach's study, a Day One investigation shows very little has changed. Tobacco workers are still getting sick and health officials are doing almost nothing to stop it. Tobacco workers cannot avoid contact with the plant and nicotine. Machines are often impractical because of cost or technology, so most tobacco 'must be picked leaf by leaf or, depending on the plant, chopped with a hatchet. Entire stalks are brought to the barn for several months of aging.

To see what happens to workers on just one day in the harvest season, we went to~T.J. Samson Hospital here in Glasgow, Kentucky. The-first nicotine victim we found was Travis Crowder. About 10:00 that morning, his fellow workers found him face down in the tobacco. field. They thought he was dead. Crowder had been picking tobacco for just four hours.In the hospital, he couldn't walk. He could barely speak. Across the hall, John Reese, an 18-year-old student. Reese has now vomited 12 times,11 before arriving in the emergency room. DR. GARY HOGAN (T.J. SAMSON HOSPITAL): He was a lot sicker _ than even I realized at first. Then when we checked the oxygen level in the young man, his oxygen level was roughly half of what it should be. It'll be interesting to see what the nicotine levels do turn out to be. I suspect that they' re going to be at near fatal levels. He may be one who doesn't get out for days. MARTIN: Dr. Gary Hogan, a former tobacco farmer, runs: the emergency room. By now, he has treated four nicotine victims, and the night is just getting started. Nicotine victim number five, Katherine Hagen. She had been hauling tobacco into the barn. Mrs. Hagen thought she had eaten a bad hamburger, but her husband knew better. And there are others. Poison victim number seven, Anthony Cummings. His uncontrolled shaking shows nicotine attacking, his nervous system. Near midnight, poison victim number eight arrives. He earned $4.00 an hour cutting tobacco. His name is Jamie Brown and he is 12 years old. He had been working in his aunt's field. She got sick, too, and is being treated in the next room. Eight nicotine poisonings, one night, one small hospital. There are scores of hospitals spread across 120 counties in Kentucky. It's anybody's guess how many other tobacco workers got sick this same night. That's because kentucky and the other.major tobacco states still do not require that all nicotine poisonings be reported. Are you saying these workers are faking?- DANNY MCKINNEY (BURI,EY TOBACCO GROWERS CO-OP) : Part of it is, yeah. MARTIN: Danny McKinney heads the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative in Lexington, Kentucky. MCKINNEY: Most issues that are so-called health issues with tobacco, in my prejudiced and narrow-minded thinking, are not. - They're political issues. And we hear all this about green tobacco sickness, I think they call it. Hogwash.

MARTIN: Day One showed McKinney the tape of our visit to the emergency room. MCKINNEY: How did you happen to be there and catch that many. at one time? MARTIU: We caught more than just this. You looked at the tape. You saw those people. What do you think? MCKINNEY: First of all, I don't know whether that tape was real or not, whether your show has concocted all that. Whether you did or not, I don't know. MARTIN: You think we'd hire these people to do this? MCKINNEY: TV stations have done things a lot worse. MARTIN: Was it a freak occurrence that we managed to see so many nicotine victims on a single night? Not according to the emergency room staff we talked to at T.J. Samson Hospital. During the harvest season, they told us, it's a common sight. The exact figures are in dispute, but one rainy day three years ago, they said, they had five times as many poisonings as we saw during our visit. BEVERLY MORTIMER (NURSE, T.J. SAMSON HOSPITAL): I can tell you how many it seemed like. It seemed like we had 100. I would say the best guess would be between 40 and 50 just with tobacco poisoning. PHYLLIS HOGAN (NURSE, T.J. SAMSON HOSPITAL) : I remember a train derailed one time. * A lot of people came in with these chemical burns and stuff like that. And the people that came in then was nothing like the people that came in the night of the tobacco poisoning. MARTIN: Ron and"Jackie Scott were among them. RON: We got so sick that we were not even capable of driving ourselves to the hospital. You're in that type'of shape. Someone has to take you. And when I arrived at the hospital, I learned that Jackie was also there. JACKIE: I was on a bed and I think I had the emergency room bed bouncing off the ground. I was jerking and shaking. MORTIMER: We kept thinking that it was going to end at any minute, and it didn't. It went on until the early morning hours. They just kept on coming. We ran out of IV fluids. We had them in the hallway on beds, on stretchers, on the floor, in wheelchairs. They just kept coming. Whole families would come.

MARTIN: Do you see any connection to the nicotine that's being handled? MCKINNEY: No. MARTIN: What do you think it is? MCKINNEY: If they're in the field cutting, it may be 95 degrees. It may be 95% humidity. The first thing you know, you can get too hot, and around home we call that white eyeing. MARTIN: White eyeing? MCKINNEY: White eyeing because you get sick and you almost pass out and your eyes roll back in your head and you're white- eyed. MARTIN: Last year, the federal government finally began sampling a small number of Kentucky hospitals to try to find out how widespread nicotine poisoning really is. The scientists reached a startling conclusion. An estimated 600 tobacco workers were sick enough to seek emergency hospital care for nicotine poisoning in one state alone. Dr. Terry Ballard did the calculations. DR. TERRY BALLARD: The number that we estimated, one out of 100, is probably an underestimate. There's a lot of people who get sick who don't go to the emergency room. ' MARTIN: Day One has learned that this year, emergency rooms in her sample area are reporting nearly twice the number of nicotine poisonings than a year ago. But that doesn't seem to worry Dr. Rice Leach, the Health Commissioner for the State of Kentucky. DR. RICE LEACH (KY STATE HEALTH CMSR) : The fact that nobody's ever reported it in any way worth talking about from the time John Smith and Pocahontas were probably cutting the leaf in Virginia until 1992 is a pretty good indicator that it's not a very big problem. • MARTIN: We showed Dr. Leach the tape of our visit to the emergency room. Does that resemble what you think of as. green tobacco N sickness? _ . ~. DR. LEACH: It resembles one piece of the.spectrum of green N tobacco sickness. It also resembles the way I felt when I went to W Bolivia the first time and Guatemala the first time. And if you've ~ traveled around the:world, which I'm sure you have, you must have t~ met Mr. Montezuma somewhere along the line. .` 1~

MARTIN: What do you say to the people in the tobacco industry who say that green tobacco sickness is not a serious ailment or doesn°t even really exist? DR. HOGAN: Come to Marion County, Kentucky next year when we harvest tobacco. EDWARD GALAID (EMORY UNIV SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH): Nicotine can kill you. In a 40% solution, it is very potent and it could kill you the same way that a nerve gas could kill you. MARTIN: It is so potent that for years, nicotine was used to kill insects. Even now, scientists don't know all the health implications of nicotine poisoning. If someone has a heart condition, could this nicotine bring on a heart attack? DR. HOGAN: I think it could. A person could be at risk to have an episode of spasm of the heart vessels. That's what nicotine does. MARTIN: Now you say as far as you know, you've never seen anyone die from this. Is that right? DR. HOGAN: I've never seen anybody with a death certificate saying nicotine poisoning or green leaf tobacco poisoning. There are instances that I wondered about, though. People, say, 35-plus years that dropped dead suddenly in the tobacco patch or dropped dead suddenly in the barn. MARTIN: Health officials say they know of no deaths from tobacco sickness, but they aren't really looking. Last year, tobacco generated nearly three billion dollars in revenues for farmers. In recent years, it has been the number one cash crop in f our states. Tobacco is already under siege from anti-smoking advocates, so states dependent on tobacco don't welcome more bad news about it. If somebody said to you one reason that this hasn't been studied up until now after 20 years of knowing about it is the fact that the tobacco: business is so important in this state, what would you say? DR. LEACH: I'm not going to speculate on that. I will tell you absolutely tobacco is an important issue here. It's a major economic issue. I would wager that this conversation would probably not have been approved ten years ago. MARTIN: Approved by whom?

- 7 - DR. LEACH: By whomever. I could not have carried on a conversation about tobacco-related illness with the national news med-ia ten years ago. MARTIN: So what can be done to protect workers from nicotine poisoning? Dr. Leach's office in Kentucky has begun educating workers about the disease and is advising that they wear water- resistant clothing, but that has serious.drawbacks. GALAID: Any prevention strategies we could imagine really aren't practical. For example, protective clothing really perhaps could cause as much harm as good because it wouldn't allow you to perspire freely and to keep your body temperature at a normal level. MARTIN: Many tobacco workers have no protection, physically or financially. They're not insured. Most don't get worker's compensation. And without a labor union behind them, they have a hard time getting farmers to pay for their medical expenses. What this means, says Dr. Diane Hudson, who sees five to ten cases: of tobacco sickness a day, is that workers have no choice but to work and to get sick. DR. DIANE HUDSON: It can be a severe problem, and we have many workers who know that they will have to be out there that next day if they're going to make their paycheck, even if they're throwing up all the next afternoon. MARTIN: Tobacco farming has changed little over this century. Next July, nearly half a million workers will again start cutting the crop, and like their fathers and grandfathers, many will get sick. Many will be children. DR. GEHLBACH: It would probably be intolerable if we were seeing people get this sick doing something that had a really beneficial outcome to it. But to get this sick harvesting a crop that has no socially redeeming value as far as most of us are concerned is really just unacceptable. SAWYER: Now, by the way, the Kentucky State Health Commissioner you saw in John's report told us that tobacco workers might want to use Dramamine to protect them from nausea. One researcher says the FDA refused to even allow a study into the use of Dramamine because all it does is mask the effects of the poison.