Neurological Problems

[Tin Can]

Conrad has a grip on reality some posters do not.

I worked in industrial test labs most of my life. I quit one company in 1972 when the testing of asbestos was not handled properly. Later I worked on asbestos replacement in engines. The genius engineers never took the replacement material's cyanide outgassing serious. They never told me until i complained. I got very bad headaches before finding ways to test under vent hoods. The lab used a lot of nastly stuff, usually with very good vent hoods, if fools would use them. One dead fool was a friend who insisted on daily cleaning his desk surface with 'Clean Off' our own product. It was aerosol cans of Trichlorethylene 111. I couldn't stop him. The factory used 100 gallon dunk tanks of it. Workers died. We stopped retail sales, but had a warehouse full of it, so the lab kept using it by the case. It is a fantasic degreaser. My fool coworker died as I was pounding on his high rise doors. I knew he was sick. He didn't call or come to work for 3 days. His name was not on the door bell. His lover never called 911 and let him die while 'caring' for him. I nearly struck that person at the funeral.

In 3 decades I never saw or heard of OSHA checking anything. Seems that all went on in the front office...

Be careful and know what you are exposing yourself to. You may not regret your own mistakes, but you must regret your poor example.

http://www.toxipedia.org/display/tox...chloroethylene

Proving cause and effect on this kind of thing is very difficult. When you're involved in some way, or even if you're not, there are a ton of human biases that make objectivity impossible. Thus the use of double blind tests and statistical analysis. We want things to have nice neat explanations, but sometimes they just don't. Peoples sensitivity to various things differs greatly. There's also the issue of how careful people are with darkroom chemicals. Some, as mentioned above, and known serious hazards. Some people may take good and reasonable precautions, others may think they do, but have some flaw in their methods, and others may just be sloppy. Out of that mix, how many actually have problems caused by their darkroom activity? All we can say for sure is, it's a really small number. Not much consolation if you're one of them. I'd research the known problems like reaction to Metol, poisoning from toner components, and odd developing agents (if you've used 'em) like pyro, ppd, and phenidone (which may not be as safe as once thought), and see if the published tox data has a lot in common with what ails you. Think about other things you might have been exposed to as well, like lead, mercury, and things from the workplace.

[Pere Casals]

Be careful and know what you are exposing yourself to. You may not regret your own mistakes, but you must regret your poor example.

This is very good advice.

One can operate with photographic chem very safely, but is necessary to follow your advice for it. Since internet era one can find plenty of information from good sources to know what one has to do and how, so it is a matter of being aware.

Xtol is not the same than stain developers, and permanganate not the same than dichromate, so when one makes a choice one has to also know how to operate, an example is deactivating dichromate after usage, the orange chomium(VI) is reduced to the green chromium(III) which is much less toxic and harmful...

Here there is a well summarized guide: https://www.fau.edu/facilities/ehs/i...als-Safety.pdf

McCann, Michael. Photographic Processing Hazards, Art Hazard News can be found used very cheap...

[ic-racer]

...my homeopathic doctor...

Have you considered asking your question to a physician with a medical degree, who can interpret the peer-reviewed scientific literature on your tumor?

[Jac@stafford.net]

[...] We both are photographers, worked in the darkroom and used Ilford chemicals. Perhaps there are other photographers out there who had similar problems.

Given that this group's constituency is photographers then the commonality of darkroom exposure is given; therefore it is also irrelevant. You may as well include cookies and milk. All a survey would demonstrate is likely a distribution of ailments similar to the general population.