BP Amoco settles suits tied to US workers' cancers

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>]

I'd bet on the hexane and NOT low level ionizing radiation as the 
cause....

BP Amoco settles suits tied to US workers' cancers

CHICAGO, March 15 (Reuters) - BP Amoco PLC on Wednesday settled five
lawsuits related to rare brain cancers developed by former employees,
which a company investigation suggested were work-related, according
to lawyers involved in the case.

Terms of the settlements were not disclosed.

A sixth lawsuit was also expected to be resolved, although still
unsettled is litigation related to cancers developed by at least a
dozen employees who worked at the company's Naperville, Illinois,
chemical research facility during the 1970s and 1980s.

Five of the six men who developed gliomas have died, and the sixth is
very ill.

Attorney Marios Karayannis represented the estate of his late father,
Nicholas, and some of the other plaintiffs who settled their suits,
an assistant said.

In response to the apparent cancer outbreak, the company hired
experts from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Alabama-
Birmingham to investigate.

In August, the researchers involved in the three-year study said they
could not conclusively trace the cancers -- some of them relatively
rare and deadly brain tumours called gliomas -- to conditions at the
facility. But they said consistent patterns pointed to handling of
two types of agents -- low-level ionising radiation and a solvent
called n-hexane.

The six people diagnosed with gliomas were all chemical researchers,
five of whom worked in the same wing of a building at the sprawling
complex.

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