Mesothelioma Cancer Law

Mesothelioma Lawyers News – 3/5/2012: More information about your search

Mesothelioma Lawyers: Exposure to asbestos is the link to the development of mesothelioma. People who end up with this disease usually have had some type of previous exposure to asbestos. How this works is not fully understood. It is thought that asbestos fibers are inhaled and first travel through the upper air passages, which include the throat, the trachea (windpipe), and the large bronchi (large breathing tubes of the lungs). These airways are lined with mucus, and therefore most of the fibers are cleared from these upper airways by sticking to this mucus and being coughed up or swallowed. When the fibers continue to travel and reach the small airways (the alveoli), the body’s immune system is able to sur­round, engulf, and remove the smaller fibers by a process known as phagocytosis.

Malignant mesothelioma is a rare form of cancer that is found m the lining of the chest and lung (the pleura), the abdomen (the peritoneum), or the saclike space around the heart (the pericardium). Although it is rare, mesothelioma is a very serious disease that is often at an advanced stage when the diagnosis is made. In the United States an estimated 2000 to 3000 new cases of mesothelioma are diagnosed each year. Approximately three fourths of these cases start in the chest cavity and are called pleural mesothe­liomas. Another 10% to 20% begin in the abdomen and are called peritoneal mesotheliomas. Lastly, those that start in the lining around the heart are called pericardial mesotheliomas, but these are extremely rare.

In America, asbestosis compensation cases began in 1927 when a Massachusetts asbestos textile worker filed a claim. A group of Johns- Manville workers launched claims in 1929 and by the mid-1930s at least sixty-nine more state compensation suits were brought against the company. During the 1930s, claims were filed against other leading man­ufacturers, such as Raybestos-Manhattan. The latter compensated about twenty cases in the 1930s, with average payments between $2,000 and $3,000, sometimes less. But it was no more than a trickle of cases. The low numbers reflected the lack of state coverage and the fact that the American system was adversarial, involving the court system. Insurers rarely accepted liability without a legal fight. It also reflected the strin­gency of compensation legislation. Here, too, many claims were ‘statute- barred’, so that workers could not claim if they had left the industry more than a year or had worked in more than one state. This was an especially cruel limitation for insulators with their itinerant work practices.

Selikoffs activities in Canada ended abruptly when the Quebec industry was nationalized, but before then trade union agitation at Thetford had triggered a federal inquiry. Published in 1976, it found that dust control was very poor and the lead investigator, Judge René Beaudry, found it ‘shocking’ that in some plants workers were still handling asbestos fiber with their bare hands. He went on to comment on employers: ‘They have kept available information about the dangerous effects of asbestos dust away from the workers and the unions.’ A similar picture was drawn by an Asbestosis Working Group in Ottawa, which suggested that McDonald’s statistics on mesothelioma were underestimated. These reports concluded that the industry was more concerned with medicalizing the asbestos problem through the compensation system and epi­demiology than by spending money on protecting workers from the dust. Revelations were also emerging of poor working conditions at the Canadian plants of Johns-Manville in Scarborough, T&N in Montreal, and Bendix Automotive in Windsor.

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