LA Times Highlights Research on Emerging Health Concerns of California Countertop Workers Suffering from Silicosis

“California regulators voted Thursday to impose a permanent set of workplace rules aimed at protecting countertop cutters from silicosis, an incurable disease that has been killing young workers.

The unanimous vote by the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board extends and expands on workplace safety rules approved a year ago on an emergency basis, which are due to expire soon.

The rules are aimed at stemming the rise among workers of silicosis, which results from inhaling tiny particles of crystalline silica that scar the lungs, leaving people struggling to breathe.

“This is a devastating disease. The evidence of its cause is overwhelming, and there’s something that we can do about it right now,” board Chair Joseph M. Alioto Jr. said before voting for the rules.

But “I’m concerned that the regulation, in some respects, does not go far enough.”

The California board also voted unanimously to convene an advisory committee to continue assessing how to strengthen the rules and implement them effectively. Alioto said the committee should also consider concerns about the rules raised by industry representatives.

Cal/OSHA estimated the expected costs of the workplace rules at $106.5 million over a decade, which the agency said would be far outstripped by the estimated benefits of $492 million from preventing illness and deaths, not counting the “indirect costs” of pain and suffering, lost wages and lost productivity.

The rules require employers to take steps to protect workers, such as providing protective respirators and using water to suppress dust, when employees are cutting, grinding or polishing slabs. They also eliminate earlier loopholes that allowed stonecutting shops to dodge safety requirements by claiming that protective steps weren’t feasible, according to Cal/OSHA officials.

More than 200 cases of silicosis have been detected among California workers who cut countertops in recent years, including at least 15 that have led to death, according to public health officials. Men in their 20s, 30s and 40s have ended up relying on oxygen tanks or waiting for lung transplants to survive. One study of California countertop cutters with the disease found the median age among those who had died was 46.

“Workers should not be dying or needing lung transplants for the sake of our kitchen countertops,” Dr. Amy Heinzerling, head of the emerging workplace hazards unit at the California Department of Public Health and PHI principal investigator, told the board.

Heinzerling said the known cases could be the tip of an iceberg because additional workers might not have been screened. State officials warned that if trends don’t change, as many as a fifth of the roughly 5,000 workers in stonecutting shops identified across California could develop silicosis and up to 200 could die of it.”

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Originally published by Los Angeles Times