During these years of the asbestos litigation saga, there have been stories of every kind of workplace exposure that has led to an asbestos disease of some sort for the employee. In Libby, Montana the story of the W.R. Grace mine and its asbestos-contaminated vermiculite ore has exposed, perhaps for the first time, exactly how lethal secondary asbestos exposure can be.
The vermiculite mine operated from about 1920 through 1990, processing the ore on site. The result was dust clouds emanating from the mine and the milling plant that regularly covered the town and surrounding environs. Libby residents talk of finding trees in the surrounding woodlands with leaves coated with mine dust.
But most importantly what Libby provides is a picture of the impact that asbestos exposure can have on people who live near facilities that use or produce asbestos products, or that live with an individual who works in an asbestos-contaminated environment.
More than 300 deaths have been linked to asbestos exposure from the vermiculite mine, and the Center for Asbestos Related Disease in Libby currently serves 2,800 patients with various stages of asbestos disease. About two-dozen new cases of asbestos disease are diagnosed every month. Many are some form of asbestos cancer.
It’s nearly impossible to get an accurate count of the deaths, because 80,000 people came and went in Libby while the mine was operating, CARD director Dr. Brad Black has said. With a 30- to 40-year latency period for asbestos disease, he predicts the last new cases will turn up somewhere around 2030.
When you link the current statistical picture in Libby with what is known about peripheral, or “paraprofessional” exposure, you will see a grim picture of what prolonged exposure to asbestos dust can do to people who live around it but do not work in it.
In the past, because of a lack of proper industrial hygiene, asbestos workers went home covered in asbestos dust. The workers’ families and other household contacts were then exposed via inhalation of asbestos dust from workers’ skin, hair, and clothing, and during the laundering of contaminated work clothes.
According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATDSR), A mortality study conducted in 1991 of 878 household contacts of asbestos workers revealed that 4 out of 115 total deaths were from pleural mesothelioma and that the rate of deaths from all types of cancer was doubled. Other studies in Hanford, Washington and in foreign countries confirm the heightened level of cancer in households where asbestos workers dwelled, and the courts are now recognizing that threat as well.
