As a young employee at electroplating company M&T Chemical in Hamilton, Ont., Lorraine Shaw developed a rash on her hand. Apparently she was allergic to the nickel she worked with every day. But the rash didn’t only tell her something about her body, and the way she reacts to certain material – it also told her something about her projected career path.

A small group of Westinghouse retirees in London, Ontario, share a pizza with occupational hygienists, trying to reconstruct, both verbally and in a drawing, their old workplace. The hygienists hope to determine whether health problems reported by other Westinghouse retirees might be due to long term exposure to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) at the old plant.