"An industrial worker got one whiff of ethylene oxide. Twenty years later, he still hasn’t recovered — and his community is searching for answers."
"Henry Morales woke up in the emergency room in Salinas, Puerto Rico, not knowing where he was. A doctor appeared beside him and gestured toward a dark-haired woman with a worried expression. “Do you know who this is?” he asked. Morales blinked, but didn’t answer. Words seemed to belong to some faraway place, and he was too tired to reach for them. “Who is this?” the doctor repeated. After a few minutes, Henry heard himself respond. “That is my wife,” he said.
The memory of what led him to the hospital returned in blurry snapshots that he continues to piece together more than 20 years later. He’d been working a regular shift at Steri-Tech, a company that sterilizes medical devices, where he’d been an operator technician for five years. His job was to move boxes of medical supplies in and out of the sterilization chambers and to check the small vials of biological material placed in each box as a way to verify that it had all been successfully sterilized. In the normal course of Morales’ work, he typically wore a respirator to protect himself from the toxic gas, ethylene oxide, used to sterilize the medical products.
On the day of his hospitalization, Morales and several coworkers had just removed a pallet of sterilized equipment from the chamber. Once the door to the chamber was closed, Morales and the others took off their gas masks, as was standard. Morales noticed that one vial of biological material was missing. He identified the box he’d overlooked and to be sure that it was sterilized, he opened it."
Lylla Younes, Naveena Sadasivam, and Joaquín A. Rosado Lebrón report for Grist August 22, 2024. This story is a collaboration between Grist and el Centro de Periodismo Investigativo. It was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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