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Welding rod litigation heats up; workers claim toxic fumes cause illness.

Article Excerpt
In 1969, neurologist Oliver Sacks discovered a seemingly miraculous treatment for patients suffering from a rare and especially debilitating form of parkinsonism that was thought to have been triggered by a viral epidemic shortly after World War I. The virus attacked the central nervous systems of its victims, weakening their muscles, giving them a fixed gaze, and leaving some in a permanent catatonic state.

While working with these patients in a mental hospital, Sacks discovered that those who were given the then-new drug L-dopa seemed to come back to life within hours of treatment. After spending decades in frozen silence, these patients were suddenly walking, talking, and laughing. Sacks wrote a book about the experience that was later made into an Oscar-nominated 1990 movie: Both were titled Awakenings.

Plaintiff lawyers are using the same word to explain why thousands of people with Parkinson's disease or parkinsonism--Parkinson's-like symptoms--have filed suit in the past year against welding rod manufacturers. Recent legal and medical developments, these lawyers say, have "awakened" welders and those who work near them to realize that their symptoms may have been caused not by a 50-year-old virus, but by toxic manganese fumes emitted during the welding process.

Class-action lawsuits await certification in several states, hundreds of claims have been consolidated in a multidistrict litigation (MDL) in federal court in Cleveland, and plaintiff lawyers estimate that individual claims now number in the thousands, with more being filed every day. (In re: Welding Rod Prods. Liab. Litig., No. 1535 (N.D. Ohio consolidated June 26, 2003).)

Don Barrett of Lexington, Mississippi, co-lead plaintiff counsel in the MDL, said his...

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