Taipei, May 24:

Weng Shih Pei-yun spent five years working at a television assembly factory in northern Taiwan in the 1970s, part of a legion of laborers who helped transform this island from agricultural backwater to industrial powerhouse.

Now the 58-year-old cancer victim says she is confined to her home in a Taipei suburb, suffering from constant headaches, daily nose bleeds and fainting spells that she blames on her time at the American-owned plant.

Weng is one of 349 people- - former factory workers or their families — suing Radio Corporation of America and its one-time parent, General Electric Co., for $72 million in cancer-related damages, allegedly resulting from contaminated water and excessive exposure to toxic chemicals at the Taiwanese facility.

In 32 years of operation, the plant employed more than 80,000 workers. While it is unclear how many of them became ill, 32 of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs have died of cancer since 2000, and 211 have developed cancerous tumors, including in the brain, lung, kidney and breast, lawyer Kent Liu of the Legal Aid Foundation in Taipei, said.

The factory closed in 1992, after switching hands twice - Fairfield, Conn.-based GE bought RCA in 1986 and sold the name to Thomson SA of France a few years later.

Some cleanup of the land was carried out by the companies in the mid-1990s, though as recently as 2004, Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Agency declared it contaminated.