Few Safeguards Protect Workers From Poisons : Labor: Some Latinos toil unaware of dangers; others risk their health. Budget woes weaken official oversight.

Each day, thousands of Latinos go to work in Los Angeles-area factories where they ingest toxic dust, expose their unprotected skin to dangerous chemicals and breathe noxious fumes that can destroy lungs and brain cells.

Some knowingly risk their health, so desperate are they to feed their families.

Many others toil in ignorance, not fully realizing that they are being exposed to materials that can kill or cripple them.

“There are easily thousands of workers in this county who are exposed to hundreds of thousands of times the allowable level of toxics, and the oversight is a fraction of what it should be,” said Dr. Paul J. Papanek, chief of Los Angeles County’s toxics epidemiology program. “There is no monitoring to speak of.”

For years, Los Angeles County has violated a state law requiring that administrators maintain an industrial hygiene program staffed by at least 10 full-time health professionals to help guard the safety of Latinos and other laborers working with toxic materials. The county phased out the program more than 10 years ago as part of budget cutbacks, The Times found.

“We used to be an advocate for the underdog worker--the unskilled Hispanic who takes the jobs no one else will take and accepts conditions no one else will accept,” said retired industrial hygienist Anastacio Medina, who worked for the defunct program. “These workers don’t have an advocate any longer.”

State legislators, facing continued budget woes, passed a law in July temporarily suspending the requirement that counties operate their own occupational health programs. The requirement is to be reinstated next July.

Cal/OSHA, the state’s health and safety agency, is supposed to check workplaces for toxic hazards. Last year, records show, Cal/OSHA industrial hygienists in the agency’s Los Angeles administrative region inspected 227 manufacturing facilities--about 1% of the total.

Thousands of industrial chemicals, heavy metals and other hazardous materials are used each day by Latino workers in Los Angeles-area factories but the only toxic substance that authorities monitor at present is lead, The Times has found.

Although Latinos make up one-third of Los Angeles County’s work force, they account for about two-thirds of adult lead poisoning cases reported to health officials, records show.

Experts believe that other toxic substances may pose a greater health threat, but the prevalence of injury remains largely unknown. Little research has been done on the subject, and workers often do not realize they are jeopardizing their health.

“We’ve seen a marked increase in occupational asthma cases, particularly among Spanish-speaking patients, and very frequently, they are simply not informed about the materials they are using,” said Dr. Phil Harber, a UCLA specialist in occupational and environmental medicine.

Amilcar Martinez rarely knew the names of the chemicals he handled during his 10 years working in poorly ventilated commercial printing plants around Los Angeles. Rarely, he said, did his employers issue him protective gloves or a mask.

The Salvadoran refugee developed a chronic cough that would last for months, he said. When he would blow his nose, the mucus would often be black. Sometimes, the skin on his hands and forearms would be bleached by the chemicals he handled.

After Martinez’s hands began to shake uncontrollably in 1991, a doctor diagnosed the problem as overexposure to toxic substances. When he went back to work the next day, Martinez said, his employer told him he was too sick to continue and fired him. Martinez now has a desk job with a refugee organization helping fellow Central Americans fill out amnesty applications.

“People are just happy to get a job when they come here,” Martinez said. “They don’t really think of what (the toxic materials) could be doing to their bodies.”

Even today, he said, he suffers from hypertension and his joints sometimes tingle inexplicably.

The printing shop where Martinez once worked underwent a management change after he left. His former employer could not be reached for comment.

Dr. Ashok Jain, County-USC Medical Center’s expert on occupational health medicine, estimated that for each worker like Martinez who is found to have a job-related toxic exposure, at least 200 others may be similarly afflicted but do not seek help. Many victims, he said, convince themselves that their headaches, cramps, difficulty breathing or other afflictions are the results of a cold or flu, even when the symptoms are recurrent and last for months--or years.

Those who do see a doctor with job-related illnesses frequently end up being misdiagnosed, Jain said. A key reason, he and other experts believe, is that most U.S. physicians receive scant training in occupational medicine.

Of 127 medical schools responding to a 1988 survey by the American Assn. of Medical Colleges, only two reported that they require medical students to take a course in occupational health.

Without proper training, Jain said, doctors often do not attempt to determine if their patients’ illnesses may be job-related.

Accurate diagnosis of toxic exposures among Latino factory workers, Jain and others believe, may be further stymied by the fact that many doctors in the Los Angeles area only speak English.

Although Los Angeles County is home to more than half of California’s manufacturing work force, few government or medical institutions in the region address occupational illnesses. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health does not have local offices, nor does the state health department’s Hazard Evaluation System and Information Service. Not a single university in Los Angeles County maintains a comprehensive occupational medicine clinic.

Under a state law passed in 1968, Los Angeles County was required to maintain an industrial hygiene program staffed by at least 10 full-time health professionals.

At one time, Los Angeles County’s Department of Health Services had such a unit, staffed by a physician, a chemical engineer, two occupational nurses, two mechanical engineers and six industrial hygienists, according to one of those hygienists, Anastacio Medina. Members of the program, Medina said, routinely visited small, non-unionized factories where undocumented Latinos worked under less than healthful conditions.

“We took the initiative,” he said. “I would like to think we saved lives.”

The unit was dismantled by 1982 to save money. County officials also said the industrial hygiene unit was discontinued because its efforts could overlap those of Cal/OSHA.

But critics contend that given its resources, Cal/OSHA is incapable of preventing injuries resulting from toxic substances and does little more than respond to accidents. Consequently, Latino workers, particularly in small non-union factories, “do not have a watchdog to help them,” Medina said.

Today, there is no county occupational health program.

Dr. Shirley Fannin, Los Angeles County’s director of disease control programs, acknowledged that the county violated for years state codes that required it to maintain a program.

“That’s the way I read the law,” Fannin said. “We should be preventing occupational disease because a worker who can no longer feed his family becomes a burden to the entire community. Unfortunately, we’re not taking care of business. Like everything else, there’s just not the money.”

The county health department does have three industrial hygienists assigned to its environmental hygiene program who look into complaints of on-the-job toxic hazards. The program, Director Cole Landowski said, does not have the resources to investigate all complaints, and often must refer them to Cal/OSHA.

It is rare, Landowski said, that Latino factory workers call for help.

“People are scared to lose their jobs,” said business representative Rex Paud, whose Metal Polishers, Buffers and Platers Union Local 67 represents about 450 workers, 90% of them Latinos. “And if they’re scared, they’re not going to make waves.”

Consider Luis Francisco Rosales, who landed a minimum wage job at the Geron Furniture Co. in Torrance after immigrating from Guatemala in 1981. Geron, whose 90 line employees are virtually all Latinos, makes tables and dressers for several motel chains including Holiday Inn, Sheraton and Travelodge.

Soon after being hired, Rosales, now 39, was assigned to Geron’s furniture finishing department, where he used a spray gun. Often, he said in an interview, he would come home at the end of the day, his face and hands black with wood stain.

He said he developed persistent headaches, dizziness and nervousness. He also had trouble breathing in bed at night.

When Rosales complained of his ailments, he said, his supervisor ordered him back to work.

It was not until 1990, when the company was unionized, that Rosales was issued a protective breathing mask and gloves, he said.

A year later, Rosales twisted his back while lifting paint cans and said he could not continue working. Doctors found he also had sustained respiratory damage from stain and lacquer fumes.

Rosales remains off the job and has a pending workers’ compensation claim.

The company’s general manager, Sam Sampeth, questioned Rosales’ injuries, calling him a pawn of physicians.

“I don’t understand how it starts out a back strain and ends up something respiratory,” Sampeth said. “But that’s the way of life in Southern California: You go to the doctor for one thing and the ambulance chasers get you for another.”

Medical records show that Rosales suffers from industrial asthma and chronic inflammation of both his sinuses and the mucous membranes in his nose. Dr. Robert M. Foster, a San Pedro internist who examined him, concluded that Rosales could never again work around toxic fumes and is a candidate for vocational rehabilitation.

The reaction of Rosales’ employer to his medical condition is not uncommon. Workers who allege harm from toxic substances often find their complaints met with disbelief.

“There’s been almost no good scientific research in the past 10 years when it comes to the toxicity of something, say, like solvents,” said Dr. James Dalhgren, a Los Angeles internist and occupational medicine specialist. “Because it’s not well documented in medical literature, the attitude among some people is that the problem doesn’t exist.”

Of more than 60,000 chemicals in commercial use today, less than 600 have been tested on animals by government researchers, records show. About 170 have been identified as potential carcinogens.

“The problem is it can take 10 to 40 years to see the results of a harmful exposure to some of these materials,” said Papanek, the county’s toxicology chief. “There may be thousands of time bombs ticking in those workplaces right now.”

A spokeswoman for the Chemical Manufacturers Assn. in Washington said products made by the organization’s 180 members pose little danger to workers if used properly.

“Chemicals can be managed safely in work environments, but it requires employers to comply with the law . . . and to educate workers,” spokeswoman Sandra Tirey said. “It also requires that workers take responsibility for protecting themselves by using the training and equipment provided to them.”

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued regulations in 1970 setting forth to what degree workers may be exposed to about 450 industrial chemicals before they are considered at risk.

Critics argued that OSHA was heavily influenced by chemical manufacturers in drafting the standards and that the limits afford little protection to workers.

As a Cal/OSHA industrial hygienist in the mid-1980s, Diane Factor interviewed more than 400 Southern California plastics workers--95% of them Latinos--as part of a state study on the effects of styrene and acetone. Although permissible toxic levels rarely were exceeded, many workers complained of chronic nausea, fatigue, headaches, dizziness and depression--classic symptoms of what Factor and other hygienists refer to as “solvent syndrome.”

“The quality of their lives was being destroyed every time many of them went to work,” said Factor, who is now with the UCLA-Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program. “The real frightening thing is, we don’t know what the long-term health effects will be with these kinds of permissible exposures.”

Elena Saliz, 45, an employee of the Kirkhill Rubber Co. plant in Brea for 13 years, knows firsthand what it is like to work with industrial solvents. She said she routinely uses powerful solvents in the manufacture of airplane gaskets at the Orange County plant, which employs more than 500 people, most of them Latinos.

Workers in her section are issued rubber gloves and masks, Saliz said, and the company monitors exposure levels. Still, Saliz said she often has headaches, an upset stomach, dizziness and difficulty remembering things--all of which she attributes to the chemicals.

“Your mind gets weak,” she said. “You try to remember and you lose seconds of time. It’s kind of scary. . . . My husband tells me to quit. I say, ‘Well, soon.’ ”

It is difficult to leave a job that pays $7.80 an hour, she said.

Although solvents are among the most common hazardous materials in the workplace, the only toxic substance that Los Angeles County authorities monitor is lead.

A Los Angeles metals company that was convicted of endangering employees provided the funding for a county lead abatement and training program that began in April, 1992. Federated-Weiner Metals agreed to provide a $200,000 grant after pleading no contest to 32 counts of overexposing workers to lead.

Lead is among the oldest known occupational health hazards and is among the easiest to detect in the bloodstream of poisoned workers. Large amounts can damage the brain, nerves, kidneys and blood, and can contribute to infertility. Poisoned workers often experience headaches, irritability, muscle or joint pains, and weakness.

Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties accounted for 90% of nearly 9,000 adult lead poisoning cases reported in California between 1987 and 1990, records show. More than half of those victims were Latinos, virtually all of them employed in foundries, pottery factories and car repair facilities.

At least 400 workplaces in Los Angeles County are known to use lead. Less than 150 have been inspected under the Department of Health Service’s program, which is staffed by one half-time and two full-time employees.

“The hygiene and ventilation are often atrocious,” said project coordinator Kathy Gilbert. “You’ve got employees eating and drinking at their workstations, even cooking their lunches in lead pots. It’s outrageous.”

Hundreds of unreported lead poisoning cases have been uncovered, while more than 2,000 mostly Latino workers have been trained in methods to avoid overexposure.

“With 10 (health workers), even for two or three years,” Papanek said, “we could have lead poisoning stamped out in this county. We could begin to lower rates of exposures to other things, like carcinogens, by maybe 30%. But the department doesn’t have 10 people. We don’t even have five.”

Funding is due to run out early next year.

Hazards in the Workplace

Latinos and other factory workers in the Los Angeles region use thousands of chemicals on the job, with virtually no government oversight.

Among the more commonly found toxic substances in the workplace: * CADMIUM: Used in electrochemical plating, soldering, brazing and ceramics. Believed to cause lung cancer as well as damage to the kidneys and liver.

* HEXANE: Component of glues and varnishes. Produces a narcotic effect when inhaled extensively, and long-term exposure can damage the central nervous system.

* HEXAVALENT CHROMIUM: Used in metal plating, spray painting and welding. Classified as a respiratory carcinogen. Can also cause skin rashes and inflammation of the stomach.

* ISOCYANATES: Various compounds found in glues and resins. Long-term inhalation can result in respiratory disease.

* METHYL CHLORIDE: Paint remover, degreaser and furniture refinishing agent that converts to carbon monoxide in the bloodstream. Causes dizziness and nausea.

* STYRENE: Used to reinforce plastic. Effects of overexposure include tendon pain and diminished ability to see color. Possible carcinogen.

* TOLUENE-2: Widely encountered component of resins, glues, paints and coatings. Produces long-term decline in lung function.

* TRICHLOROETHYLENE: A degreaser and dewaxer that can produce numbness and amnesia. Its use in food processing was stopped in 1975 after it was linked to liver cancer in mice.