Mesothelioma and Asbestos
Mesothelioma Legal Issues
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In the United States, the average Mesothelioma related settlement was $1 million; for cases that go to trial awards averaged $6 million, according to a study by the RAND Corporation. Only a small fraction of the thousands of asbestos related lawsuits in the United States every year are related to mesothelioma. In 2004, a bill in the United States Senate aimed at asbestos litigation reform failed to reach a floor vote. In January of 2005, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter announced he would again try to pass an asbestos litigation reform bill.
A separate bill introduced on March 17, 2005, the Fairness in Asbestos Injury Resolution Act of 2005 (FAIR act of 2005), seeks to ensure a set amount of compensation dependent on the symptoms of the victim. The range is from Medical Monitoring for victims with Asbestosis or Pleural Disease to $35,000 for victims with Mixed Disease With Impairment all the way to over $1,000,000 for Mesothelioma victims and nonsmoking Lung Cancer victims.
Asbestos and the Law
The British Government's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has promoted rigorous controls on asbestos handling, based on reports linking exposure to abestos dust or fibres with thousands of annual deaths from mesothelioma and asbestos-related lung cancer.
- At least 3500 people in Great Britain die each year from mesothelioma and asbestos related lung cancer as a result of past exposure to asbestos. Annual numbers of deaths are predicted to go on rising into the next decade.
- The TUC (UK) report cites a figure of 5000 deaths per year. TUC (UK)
The mineral (asbestos) has now been banned in all of the leading European countries, and the year 2005 is the deadline for bans by countries in the European Union. Having virtually no internal market for asbestos, Canada (one of the world's largest producers) exports 97 percent of all asbestos mined (mostly to Asia).
It is generally well-accepted that mesothelioma is almost always associated with asbestos exposure. The fact that, in such cases, the disease usually only occurs between 20-40 years after exposure to asbestos, however, has lead to very real difficulties in unambiguous quantitative diagnoses and to much controversy regarding compensation and liability disputes. (It has a very poor prognosis, with most patients dying within 2-4 years of diagnosis)
There is no scientific consensus as to whether there does indeed exist a threshold of exposure to asbestos below which a person is at zero risk of developing mesothelioma. The HSE does not assume that such a threshold exists, since they consider that it cannot currently be quantified for practical purposes; they cite evidence from epidemiological studies of asbestos exposed groups to argue that any such threshold for mesothelioma must be at a very low level.
Definitions
Care should be taken to distinguish between several forms of relevant diseases. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), these may defined as:-
- Asbestosis (which is a slowly developing fibrosis of the lung caused by the inhalation of high concentrations of asbestos dust and/or long exposure),
- Lung cancer, or “bronchial carcinoma” which can result from occupational exposures to certain substances, including asbestos fibres (even without co-existing asbestosis) and,
- Mesothelioma which is a malignant tumour of the pleura or peritoneum.
The latter is normally a very rare type of cancer (typically less than 0.04% of all deaths in the general population). A higher incidence of mesothelioma has nearly always been related to the inhalation of mineral fibres, and in the majority of cases to occupational asbestos exposure.
In order to not present an over-long article here, currently only specific examples regarding the situation in Britain and the USA are included. (links to resources regarding the situation in other countries are listed below).
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