A day after one of its workers died after exposure to a chemical at its Payson plant, the Sabinsa Corp. contends the substances the employee worked with were "all nutritional ingredients; none of which are toxic or dangerous."
But state work safety officials say they are investigating to determine whether the compound Mauricio Lacayo said he was handling prior to falling ill is hazardous.
Lacayo, 30, became sick on the job Tuesday morning with profuse vomiting. Complaining of dizziness and a headache, he told medical personnel at a health clinic he had worked with "L-selenomethionine," which is used as a source of the trace element selenium that is found in most multivitamins.
Lacayo, who had been with Sabinsa for two years and worked in the plant's Quality Assurance Department, didn't improve at the clinic and died en route to American Fork Hospital that same afternoon.
Sabinsa, which provides ingredients to nutritional supplement, pharmaceutical, cosmetics and food companies, confirmed that Lacayo had been working with the substance, also known as "LSM," at the request of a company supervisor, who asked him to measure out a 10.5 gram sample.
"The remaining amounts in the container with which he worked have been measured and all the material is accounted for, ruling out LSM as the cause of his symptoms," according to a statement from the company, whose U.S. headquarters is in New Jersey and which has offices and manufacturing facilities in seven countries.
The state government office that investigates workplace accidents -- Utah Occupational Safety and Health -- said there is no history of safety violations at the Sabinsa plant, which opened in Payson in 1997 and has 43 employees.
UOSH sent a state compliance safety and health officer to the plant Wednesday to investigate the incident, said Robyn Barkdull of the Utah Labor Commission, which supervises the regulatory agency.
Sabinsa spokeswoman Suzanne Shelton said in an e-mail that LSM has been extensively researched and that an independent toxicologist panel has classified the substance as "generally recognized as safe."
Yet UOSH isn't so sure.
"We've just begun to do some research [on LSM] and at this point we have conflicting information on its safety from two different reliable sources," said Eldon Tryon, a compliance officer at UOSH. "So there is more we need to learn."
Toxicology results can be expected in eight to 12 weeks, according to the Utah Medical Examiner's Office.
In an e-mail, Shelton stated standard safety procedures call for employees to wear safety equipment such as gloves and masks when examining samples.
"As you know, anything in large enough amounts, including water, can be toxic," said Shelton. "When handled properly, and it is outside the realm of possibility that Mauricio Lacayo did not know the proper procedures the company had in place, he would not have ingested or inhaled or been otherwise exposed to material he was handling."
Still, no one was in the room with Lacayo when he was working with the LSM, and the company cannot verify he followed procedures, she said.
Lacoya's job involved sampling and testing a variety of ingredients from suppliers, but he did not handle LSM on a daily basis, Shelton said. "Again, the substances Mauricio handled for Sabinsa [on Tuesday] would not have caused anything like this."
