SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (Legal Newsline) - An attempt to form a class action seeking medical monitoring for thousands of workers exposed to metalworking fluids failed, as a Missouri appeals court upheld its dismissal because there was no evidence the plaintiffs needed future monitoring for lung disease that typically shows symptoms immediately.
Two workers sued Scroll Compressors and Emerson Electric, claiming their exposure to MWFs at a plant in Lebanon, Mo., could cause respiratory and other illnesses. Their lawyers sought a court-supervised trust to fund a medical monitoring program for diagnostic testing and treatment of future diseases stemming from MWF exposure.
Anticipating a challenge to their suitability as representative plaintiffs, the workers asked the court for permission to amend their petition and add another plaintiff. The trial court allowed it over the defendants’ objection, and Nancy Salzman was added as class representative in 2018.
Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, Salzman had the same problem as the others: She had already obtained a physical exam with medical history, pulmonary functioning testing, chest imaging and blood work. Salzman, a smoker for 50 years, was diagnosed with restrictive lung disease in 2015 and quit her job at the plant in 2017.
The trial court granted summary judgment to the defendants and the Missouri Court of Appeals, in an Aug. 23 decision by Judge Jack A.I. Goodman, agreed.
The appeals court cited testimony by the plaintiffs’ own experts that unlike with asbestos and other toxic exposures, there is no latency period for MWF-related disease.
“Medical monitoring is a unique remedy,” the appeals court said, reserved for situations in which plaintiffs have no symptoms or diagnosable injury after exposure but become sick years or decades later.
In this case, “all of the claims would be for a present physical injury, not an asymptomatic, undiagnosable disease at present that, due to latency, may develop at some point in the future and therefore necessitates medical monitoring.”
Individual plaintiffs can still sue the companies over MWF exposure, the appeals court said, as the two original proposed class representatives did. A class action therefore wouldn’t be a superior means for resolving cases where the evidence of injury should be immediately available.
Medical monitoring is a hotly disputed remedy in courts around the nation. Plaintiff lawyers support it in part because they can earn large fees from the establishment of a medical-monitoring trust and move on to other litigation opportunities. A federal judge in Ohio has allowed a proposed class action that would involve virtually every person in America over PFAS exposure to move forward, while a Connecticut judge this year denied an attempt to form a medical-monitoring class for workers who claimed they were exposed to asbestos during a construction project.