[h=2]Teflon?s Toxic Legacy[/h] [h=5]For more than half a century DuPont hid information that a chemical it was using to make Teflon might be making people sick.[/h] By
Sharon Kelly
photos by Maddie McGarvey
Almost two decades ago, Carla Bartlett, a then 41-year -old West Virginia secretary and mother of two, was first diagnosed with cancer ? what her surgeon later labeled a ?garden variety? type of kidney cancer.
?I was scared to death,? Bartlett, now 59, told an Ohio federal jury this fall during hearings in the first of more than 3,500 personal injury and wrongful death suits by West Virginia and Ohio residents against the chemical giant DuPont. ?And all I could think of was not being there, not being able to be there for my family.? Bartlett?s tumor and part of her rib were removed in a surgery in 1997 that, she said, involved cutting her ?virtually in half.? Though the cancer hasn?t recurred since, for Bartlett, the harm, both physical and emotional, has lingered. ?It?s never out of my mind, because you worry constantly about it,? she said. ?And then I have the reminder of the scar, every day, that, you know, this? this is? this was cancer; this could come back.?
On October 7, after less than a day of deliberations, the jury found DuPont liable for Bartlett?s cancer, agreeing with the defendant that the company had for years negligently contaminated her drinking water supply in Tuppers Plain, Ohio with a toxic chemical formerly used to make its signature brand of nonstick coating: Teflon.
What makes the verdict remarkable is that unlike, say, mesothelioma ? a form of lung cancer almost exclusively linked to asbestos exposure ? the renal cell carcinoma that struck Bartlett is not usually considered the calling card of a specific carcinogen...
...
Buck Bailey, whose mother worked at the Teflon plant in Parkersburg, was born with just one nostril and other facial deformities.
