Tobacco Documents Online

New Ko.ka 212~30A 1.00 aa a o Chica9es 312S/12020 I V R ORT EP S Cifroih ,313-344J C77 Los Anyaeu :213 466,61241 . Washinqten, Q:Ca 301-6'56.068'R ;ealetu 6117.576-2232' . e Philadelphiat 21'5-567-7N00 TR'/1NSCRIPT' San F.arttisce:213-t60.6124 Miomit 305J58J358 FOR' PHIL PROGRAM DAY DATE . 11/2 IP MORRIS' ONE. 2/93 :30 P.M. STATION CITY AUDIENCE WABC-TV & THE ABC TW' IidETWORK NEW YORK SUBJECT NICO TINE' POISONI NG BROADCAST EXCERPT FORREST SAWYER (FIOST) : For the pas!t six months, Day One has bee'n investigating a violent sickness that strikes thousands of people every year. Now if'this.happened in a city or a suburb, it wou!1d be cause for hysteria, but the vict,ims' 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 illne'ss goes hand! in hand with the work they do and no one''s.paid much attention -- until now. Here's John~Martin. J!OHNi MARTIN ( R'EPORTER) : Harvest season in America' s tobacco belt. B.J. Childress is 12 years old. Like many c'hilidren' in this region, he cuts tobacco, and like his friends,, he: sometimes get sick. Hie, passed out cutting tobacco, last year. B. J. CHILDRESS (TOBACCO CUTTE'R) : I thought I wa's going to die for a rninute'_ I believe it was tobacco poisoning,, but I don't know. MARTIN: The first time that happened, B.J. was just seven yearsoSd. All through the tobacco belt, children and adults are helping bring in the crops and many of them, young and o1d, 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 WORK'ER): Your legs want you've dry heaved. because you''ve strained to give way N , ._ ~ JACKIE: I threw up so much that it had' ruptured the lining in ~ my s tomach,. You't j ust think you' re dying. a ~ . - . 1~ - ~ WiN1. Rodso N'Report. endaor«a lo oswn dr ocavracy o( mawid r ppL-.d by il. ,il lcama ib. teapon.i6ir(or wistoius a anisswns. NAowiol wPplwd by Rod.o iY'ReFwnt ewy be vs.d ior 66 and i.elMwme Pu.pos+n aJy_ R'mor nW ib. ~.eprodpc.d. sold a publ.cljr dsrnonstrowsd or ..6&.d

MARTIN:~ The illness had been a mystery for as long as anyone could rernember. Then 20 years ago, a public health official in North Carolina decided to investigate this tobacco sickness. DR. STEPHEN GEHLBACH ('U MASS SCHOOZ.. OF PUBLIC HEALTHIj : Physicians who worked'out in the tobacco regions~had seen it when we started asking them, about ilt, and we were quite stunned at their lack of curiosity about what was going on. It really was an acceptedipart of the culture. MABTI~N: 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 rai~nfaLls. DFt'. GEHLBACH: I can remember'very d'istinctly 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 Gehlibach began to suspect that the plant itself was producing alpoison, 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 ofltime!and something isn't done about it. MAR'TIN:~ 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,f 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 oftien, impractical because of cost or technology, so most tobacco must be picked leaf by leaf or,r depending on the plant, chopped with a hatchet. Entire stalks are brought to the barn for several months of aging.

- 3 - 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 Crowdier.. About 10:0'0i that morning, hia 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. Acros& the hall,. John R'eese, 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'11 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. MARTII3:Dr.Gary Hogan, aformer tobaccof'armer,, runs the emergency room. By now,he has treated four nicotine victims, and the nigh~t 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..0!0 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 stil.l do not require that all nicotine poisonings: reported. Are.you saying these workers.are fakingi?- DA'HHY MCKINNEY (BURLEY TOBACCO GROWERS CO-OP) : Part of it is, yeah. ~-_ . . MARTIN: Danny McKinney heads the Burley Tobacco Growers~ - . Cooperative in Lexington, Kentucky., jU Q MCKINNEY': Most issues that are so-called health issues with NN tobacco, in my prejudiced and narrow-mindedl thinking, are not. -- F;;b They're political issues. And we hear all this about greentobacco Q sickness,I think they call,it. Hogwash. ~-A W

MAR"TIM: Day One showed McKinney the tape of our visit to the emergency roorni. MCKINNEY: How did youihappen to be there and catch that many. at one time? MARTIN:. We caught more than just this. You looked at the tape. You saw those people. What do you think? MCKINNEY: First of,a11, 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: Youithink we'd hire these people to do this? MCKINNEY: TV'stations have done things a!lpt worse. MARTIN: Was it a freak occurrence that we managedito see so many nicotine victims on a, single night? Not according to the: emergency room staff we talked to, at T.Ji. 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 1010. 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 andi'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'f'luids. We had them inn the hallway on beds, on stretchers, omthe floor, in wheelchairs. They just kept coming. Whole families~ would come.

- 5 - MARTIhTi: Do you see any connection to the nicotine that's! being handled'? MICK'IhTTTEY : No. MARTINi: What do you think it is? MCK'INNEY: If they're in the field cutting, it may be 95 degrees. It may be 9'S% humidity. The first thing you know, youu can get too:hot, and around home we call that white eyeing. MARTIU: 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. MARTIIIT: 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, seekemerg~encyhospital care! fornicotinepoisonirng in one state alone. Dr. Terry Ballard did' the calculations. DR. TERRY BALLARM 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 CMS'R) : 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 199'2 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 sickness? _ r~ 0 0 . 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 ~Clb Bolivia the first time and Guatemala the first time. And if you've O' traveledaround the:world, which,I'm sure you have, you must have ~ met Mr. Montezuma somewhere along the line. . ~ ~ Glt.

- 6 - MARTIN: What do you say to the people in the tobacco industry who say that greem 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 HEALTII) : Nicotine can kill you. In a 40% solution, it is very potent and it couldi kill you the same way that a nerve gas could kill you. MARTIh1r It is so potent that for years, nicotine was used too kill insects., Even now, scientists dion'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 couMbe at risk to~ have an episode of' spasm of the heart vessels. That's whatt nicotine does. MARTIN: Now you say as far as you know, you've never seen, anyone die fromithils. Is that right? DR. HOGAN: I've never seen anybody with a death certificatee saying nicotine poisoning or green leaf tobacco poisoning. There are instances that I wondered about, though. People, say, 35-p1us! 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 four 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 knowingi 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 beeniapproved ten years ago. ~ MARTIN: Approved by whom? ~ _ . . N 04 - N . . ~ C~

7 DR. LEACH': By whomever. I could not have carried! on a: conNersatilon~about tobacco-related illness with the national newsl media ten years ago.. . MARTIN: So what cani be done to protect workers from nicotine poisoning? Dr. Lealch'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 areni'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, normaT!l level. MARTIN: Many tobacco workers have no protection, physically or financially. They're not insuredi. 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 workersl 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 willi get sick. Many,will be children., DR. GEHLBACH: It would! probably be intolerable if we~ were seeing people get this sick doingg 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 usl 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,.