A Colorless, Toxic Gas (EtO) Sterigenics Plant. IL Woman Won $363M after Yrs of Exposure, Cancer..
- 'It’s a colorless, toxic gas. A US woman won $363m after years of exposure.' The Guardian, Nov. 26, 2022. - Ed.
An Illinois resident won her case against the company Sterigenics – but other sufferers’ lawsuits hang in the balance
For more than 30 years, Susan Kamuda lived with her family several hundred yards away from an unassuming brick building situated in a small office park. Kamuda’s son, Brian, remembers riding his bike past the building on his way through the neighborhood; he later taught a girlfriend to drive in the nearby parking lot. Neither Kamuda nor the surrounding community knew that the building housed a company that was spewing a colorless gas into the skies above Willowbrook, a middle-class, suburban enclave south-west of Chicago.
A company called Sterigenics used the gas, ethylene oxide (EtO), to sterilize medical devices and other products.
Susan Kamuda, now 70, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, despite having no history of the disease in her family. Last year, Brian, 49, learned the debilitating pain he had been suffering in his back & hips – pain he assumed came from kidney stones – was instead stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma. There are 19,000 people living within a mile radius from the plant, as well as 4 schools. The Kamudas know of many others who have fallen sick, but only in recent years did they come to believe there was a connection to the Sterigenics building.
Susan and Brian have been prominent figures in the push to charge Sterigenics with responsibility for illnesses in the community.
It operates numerous other such plants in the US & around the world. “The hardest part right now is waiting every 3 months to see how much longer I have to live,” said Brian, who has endured multiple cycles of aggressive chemotherapy & other treatments, and is tested every few months as doctors monitor the progression of his disease. “In darker times I think about how many years have been taken off my life between the cancer & the treatment,” he said. Until last week, the question of Sterigenics’ culpability had seemed settled. It had been cemented when Susan Kamuda sued Sterigenics & was awarded $363m by an Illinois jury – the highest jury verdict on record for an individual plaintiff in Illinois.
Hundreds of others are also taking the company to court. But in a striking reversal, jurors in the second trial against the company found on Saturday that it was not liable for the cancer diagnosis of another area resident, Teresa Fornek, in a lawsuit she brought against Sterigenics.
Sterigenics said in an email that the Kamuda verdict was not based on evidence. “We will continue to vigorously defend against allegations about our ethylene oxide operations & emissions,” said a company spokesperson. This means the concerns around EtO are far from settled.
EtO has been associated with an increased risk for cancer since the 1970s. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that the greatest cancer risk is for people who have lived near a facility that has released EtO into the air for many years...
- More, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/26/toxic-gas-us-woman-won-363m-exposure