'It's Going To Get Worse': How U.S. Countertop Workers Started Getting Sick

Ublester Rodriguez could not have anticipated that his life would be profoundly changed by kitchen and bathroom countertops.

He says that he grew up poor, in a small Mexican town, and came to the United States when he was 14. He spoke no English, but he immediately got a job.

"In the beginning I was working in a Chinese restaurant, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. It was all day, so I never had time to go to school," he recalls. "I was a dishwasher."

He labored in restaurant kitchens for about eight years. But he wanted Sundays off to go to church and play soccer. So when his brother-in-law offered to help him get a new job, he jumped at the chance.

That's how he ended up in a workshop that cuts and polishes slabs of an artificial stone to make kitchen and bathroom countertops.

"It was something totally different for me," says Rodriguez.

Back then, in 2000, the material he was cutting was also something totally different for the American countertop industry. The stuff looked a lot like natural granite. In reality, it was made in a factory, from bits of quartz bound together by a resin.

This kind of engineered stone, often marketed as simply "quartz," is now one of the most popular options for kitchen and bathrooms.

Health concerns emerge

The trouble is, workers have gotten sick, and even died, after cutting this engineered stone and breathing in its dangerous dust, public health officials say.

Overseas, some are even calling for a ban on selling engineered quartz for countertops.

Rodriguez, 42, is the first person known to have fallen ill in the U.S. His lungs are so damaged that he is on oxygen about six hours a day. Doctors expect that he will need a lung transplant.

And so far, physicians have identified at least 18 countertop workers with silicosis in this country. They worry