This past August, OSHA, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency,

and the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced they would work together to fight

health and safety hazards. On September 9, 1977, three of these agencies,

who held a news conference in the Labor Department building in Washington,

and disclosed plans to combat the dangers of Diabrano-Claw Colpay, also known as DBCP.

In the 1950s, Dow Chemical and the Shell Company developed a long-awaited pesticide called

DiBromocloropropane, or DBCP, that was designed to eliminate a microscopic parasitic

soil dwelling worm called an nematode, which had been feeding on the roots of banana plants unchecked

for far too long. As advertised, DBCP proved very effective at killing the nematodes,

and reportedly every other creature that happened to take a sip from the runoff.

But in 1977, factory workers at an Occidental Petroleum Corporation plant in California,

where DBCP was produced under the brand-name Nima Gone, discovered that the chemical was also

very effective at killing another kind of microscopic organism as well. Lab tests revealed that

the sperm counts for a third of the staff responsible for producing DBCP at that Occidental plant

were so low that the men were declared sterile. This news came as a surprise to the workers,

who had not been informed of the chemical dangers, even though the chemical dangers had been

observed even before it had been approved for sale. Studies conducted by Shell and Dow 20 years

earlier had found that in animals, prolonged exposure to DBCP led to liver, kidney, and

lung damage in addition to elevated levels of cancer and shriveled testicles. Yet the product

was approved for sale by the United States government anyway, because the companies had expressed

doubt that the results would not be repeated in humans. Whoops. Thanks to a lawsuit, Occidental Petroleum

would ultimately pay out millions of dollars to those employees affected by the chemical.

...