Tennessee: Widow Fails in Attempt to Tie Husband’s Pancreatic Cancer to Coal Tar Pitch Exposure at Work

In an occupational disease/death case, the evidence in the record did not preponderate against the trial court's determination that a deceased employee's widow failed to establish that her deceased husband’s pancreatic cancer was causally related to her husband’s work-related exposure to coal tar pitch. The employer's expert testified that the employee possessed recognized risk factors for the development of pancreatic cancer that were wholly unrelated to his work exposure to coal tar pitch, and those risk factors, not any work-place exposure, caused the employee's pancreatic cancer. The widow’s expert relied upon a single medical article, yet that article expressly noted its evidentiary deficiencies, and thus the medical opinion of the widow’s expert was insufficient to establish a causal connection between the employee's coal tar pitch exposure and the development of pancreatic cancer.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Alcoa, Inc. v. McCroskey, 2018 Tenn. LEXIS 659 (Oct. 30, 2018)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 130.06.

Source:Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law