American Airlines uniforms by Twin Hill. American Airlines A group of American Airlines flight attendants has retained legal counsel in preparation for a lawsuit after claiming their uniforms have caused them severe medical distress.

The yet-to-be filed lawsuit is expected to name uniform supplier, Twin Hill, as a defendant, author and member of the American Airlines flight attendant group, Heather Poole, told Business Insider.

It is unclear if American Airlines will be a co-defendant in the matter.

The group has retained Los Angeles-based firms Balaban & Spielberger as well as Kabateck Brown Kellner.

The group is currently looking for other colleagues whose health has been negatively affected by the uniforms to join in a potential class-action suit.

Since September 2016, several thousand American Airlines flight attendants, ground staff, and pilots have reported suffering from a variety of illnesses since being issued new uniforms made by Twin Hill. The Association of Professional Flight Attendants claims it has received notice of more than 3,500 cases of suspected health reactions.

"We haven’t been formally notified about any of these actions and we won’t speculate on what might happen," an American Airlines spokeswoman told Business Insider. "Safety has been and remains our number one priority and we would never ask our team members to wear an unsafe uniform."

According to several American Airlines flight attendants who have spoken with Business Insider, symptoms include extreme respiratory distress, nausea, headaches, and full-body rashes. Extreme cases have even seen at least one instance of heavy metal poisoning. This has forced many of the affected flight attendants to put their careers on hold to seek medical attention.

In June, American Airlines announced that it will drop Twin Hill as its uniform supplier, but new uniforms are not expected to be ready until 2020.

In a statement to Business Insider, a Twin Hill spokesman said:

"While we sympathize with the flight attendants who claim to be experiencing a variety of health problems, Twin Hill has and will continue to stand behind our products, which are worn without issue by millions of people around the world each day. There has been absolutely no evidence presented linking the reported symptoms to our uniforms. To the contrary, all scientific evidence we have reviewed to date demonstrates that the products that we have and continue to deliver to American are safe and fit for their intended purpose.



Moreover, we would note again that when presented with similar complaints from Alaska Airlines flight attendants, a federal court issued a conclusive ruling that our uniforms could not have been the cause of the alleged symptoms. This ruling was based not only on findings by a federal investigative agency but also on four full years of legal discovery, including testing by five separate labs, the collection of hundreds of thousands of pages of medical records from more than 445 doctors and medical facilities, and the testimony of four separate experts.



Based on the facts of this matter, including the extensive testing of the American uniforms by independent, industry-leading global laboratories, we are confident that any lawsuit filed by the American employees would simply be without merit."