RICHMOND, Va. (Legal Newsline) - A man who claimed he contracted nasal cancer because Georgia-Pacific and Weyerhauser failed to put warning labels on lumber lost his case after a federal appeals court agreed that “state-of- the-art” knowledge at the time didn’t support the conclusion sawdust was carcinogenic.
Christopher Lightfoot said he spent hours each week working with his father in a home wood shop from the 1980s until 1992, without wearing a face mask. He was diagnosed with nasal cancer in 2014 and sued Georgia-Pacific and Weyerhauser in 2016, claiming he wouldn’t have gotten cancer if the boards had come with warning labels.
A district court dismissed his case, saying the defendants didn’t have a duty to warn customers because the nasal cancer risk wasn’t known until 1995, when the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration classified sawdust as a carcinogen.
The trial court also said Lightfoot failed to raise a question of fact about whether warnings on the lumber would have protected him, since his father likely wouldn’t have heeded the warnings and still only occasionally wears a dust mask.
North Carolina law requires plaintiffs to prove the defendant owed them a duty to warn against known dangers, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said in a decision upholding the dismissal.
“The state of the art is not defined by cutting-edge knowledge or new research that `pushes the envelope,’” the court said.
Research into wood dust raised concerns in the 1980s but it wasn’t until 1995 that IARC definitively stated it could cause cancer. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and OSHA reached similar conclusions at the same time.
Lightfoot argued the district court applied an unacceptable “litmus test” by citing the 1995 OSHA determination. But the court also considered IARC’s conclusion, the appeals court said, which in turn was based upon a broad survey of the literature. The appeals court also agreed the lumber companies didn’t have a duty to react to each study as it came out, “however isolated or cutting edge.”
Finally, the appeals court agreed it was correct to reject opinions by the plaintiff’s experts that IARC and NIOSH reports from the 1980s concluded wood dust was carcinogenic. The trial court concluded the reports spoke for themselves.
“We agree,” the appeals court said. “No expert is needed to understand IARC’s 1981 conclusion” that the nasal cancer risk was then limited to furniture manufacturing workers.
“The whole point of a state-of-the-art inquiry is to determine what the defendants should have known in the exercise of ordinary care, and the best marker for that is the plain meaning of the words that they would have read, not the inferences or interpretations made by experts years later,” the court concluded.