Popcorn workers stuck with painful legacy

By SHARON COHEN

updated 12:52 p.m. ET Oct. 29, 2007

Each morning, Eric Peoples sits up in bed and starts his day with a cough. A deep, long, hacking cough.

He plants his feet on the bedroom floor and immediately feels as if someone is standing on his chest. That’s a good day. When it gets really bad, it seems as though a giant creature is crushing his lungs, squeezing the breath out of him.

Eric Peoples has lived this way for eight years. He got sick while mixing butter flavoring at a Missouri microwave popcorn plant, developing a ravaging lung disease that has tormented a small but alarming number of food workers across the nation.

Peoples sued. He won millions of dollars. Money isn’t a worry now. His health is.

At 35, he walks slowly. Stairs are murder; sometimes he stops to rest on each one. He has lost three-fourths of his lung capacity and depends on oxygen when it’s humid. One day, he may need a double lung transplant.

Peoples says no amount of money can make up for all that he has missed out on in life: the chance to play ball with his son, teach his daughter to ride a bike, do whatever he wants. He isn’t as angry as he once was, he says, and was thrilled when some microwave popcorn makers said they’ll stop using the chemical tied to his illness.

But even now, it’s confounding to him that a pungent-smelling flavoring that he poured in giant vats, a bright yellow pudding-like substance used to improve the taste of a common snack — popcorn — did this to him.

“When I first started getting sick, I was trying to figure out what it was,” he says. “It never dawned on me that it was the butter flavoring. It’s food. You eat it. I kept telling my family, surely it can’t be. Why would something like that be harmful? How could it be bad?”

Hidden threat
In a world filled with hazards, some workers obviously face perilous conditions: miners burrowing hundreds of feet in the earth, farmers spraying pesticides, meatpackers wielding long knives to carve up huge carcasses moving quickly down a line.

By that yardstick, mixing an additive that’s used to flavor popcorn, candy, baked goods and other foods — it’s also found naturally in small amounts in staples such as milk and butter — almost seems innocuous.

But to many, it’s not.

For several years, diacetyl, a chemical that gives foods a buttery taste, has been linked to a rare, irreversible lung disease. The result has been a public health debate that has stretched from Congress to courtrooms across the nation, leading to tens of millions of dollars in judgments.

Scientists, doctors, politicians, food companies, labor unions, lawyers and others have weighed in — some pointing angry fingers at the government — as hundreds of workers have claimed they have severe lung disease or other respiratory illnesses from inhaling diacetyl vapors.

And it may go beyond workers.

In recent months, it was disclosed that a man who ate at least two bags of buttery microwave popcorn daily for 10 years may have the same disease found in workers. His lung problems were linked to breathing the vapors. His kitchen had diacetyl levels comparable to those in popcorn plants.

Now some major microwave popcorn companies have eliminated or plan to drop the ingredient, while Congress — with the support of the flavoring industry — is looking to reduce the danger in the workplace. But the Bush administration, some business groups (including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) and others say there isn’t enough scientific evidence to warrant immediate government limits.

Edwin Foulke Jr., a top federal official, testified this spring at a congressional hearing that Diacetyl is a “substance of suspicion,” but there’s no clear evidence it’s the one chemical that causes this disease.

The doctor who made an early link between the disease and the flavoring disagrees. “It is absolute baloney,” says Dr. Allen Parmet, a Kansas City public health physician. “The science is solid. ... For him to say that is a willful disregard of reality.”

Parmet thinks popcorn makers are “doing the right thing” by dropping diacetyl. “I just wish this had been done earlier,” he says. “There are hundreds of people who are sick and who are hurt and it never should have happened.”

'Pretty strange lung problems'
Seven years ago, an attorney approached Parmet with a mystery. He told Parmet he was representing several workers with “some pretty strange lung problems” and asked the doctor to review their medical records.

Charlie Riedel / ASSOCIATED PRESS Eric Peoples stands in front of the popcorn plant where he contracted a lung disease from exposure to butter flavoringin Jasper, Mo.

Within 20 minutes, Parmet says, he knew the problem was bronchiolitis obliterans, a devastating disease that destroys the small airways of the lungs, leaving victims coughing and gasping for air. The illness has been associated with jet fuel, strong acids, some viruses and rejections of lung transplants.

Parmet had seen it only three times in 25 years. Now he was poring over documents indicating several people had the disease — all employees of the Gilster-Mary Lee microwave popcorn plant in Jasper, Mo.

“It was ‘holy smokes!”’ he says. “I’ve got eight or nine cases here in a group of 200 people in a town of 1,000. Mentally, I’ve made this leap — that’s an epidemic.”

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health dispatched investigators to the plant. By 2001, it had reported a link between butter flavorings and the disease, which became known as popcorn lung.

Three years later, the agency sent an alert to 4,000 companies with about 150,000 workers explaining steps both sides should take as safety precautions. Among them: respirators, ventilation systems that prevent vapors from escaping and regular lung function tests for employees.

By then, Keith Campbell was already sick.

He says he was diagnosed with bronchiolitis obliterans in 2002, after working two years at a ConAgra microwave popcorn plant in Ohio.

Why, he wonders, did it take so long to do something about this?

“They’ve known for five years that something is wrong,” he says. “I don’t understand it. Once something is found out something is bad for you, instead of trying to control it, I think it should be banned. I don’t care if it’s butter flavoring or a nuclear power plant. Why mess around? ... Take responsibility.”

Campbell, who lost about 60 percent of his lung capacity, doesn’t blame the plant. He sued the flavor companies, winning an undisclosed settlement. But it’s a hollow victory.

“I got a new truck and new home, but I paid a high price for it,” he says.

“I can’t go deer hunting. I don’t get to play basketball. I can’t go out and run and play catch with my grandkids. If I dwelled on it, I’d be mad.”

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