Maine Has Highest Rate of Death From Mesothelioma
April 29, 2009
Reported By: Josie Huang
It’s been known for decades that breathing in asbestos can lead to a cancer called mesothelioma. In the early 1970s, industrial manufacturers stopped the widespread use of asbestos in products such as brake linings, insulation and cement. But the disease take decades to show up, so many people are just getting sick now. Now a new report shows that Maine has the highest death rate from the disease per capita than anywhere else in the country.
“We noticed that death rate in Maine is 27.5 per million population — the highest rate in the United States,” says Ki Moon Bang, the senior epidemologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which studied mesothelioma mortality rates from 1999 to 2005. During that period, 173 Mainers died from the disease.
Bang says that some people may have gotten sick from living and working in old Maine buildings, that have not undergone asbestos abatement. He says that there are naturally-occurring asbestos deposits where Maine borders New Brunswick and Quebec.
But perhaps the most important reason is this: Some of Maine’s biggest employers in the past used asbestos, industries such as “paper companies and chemical companies and the shipyard industry,” Bang says. “A recent study at the National Cancer Institute shows that workers employed in shipyards face elevated risk from abestos-related disease.”
Exposure to asbestos, a mineral that comes in masses of strong, flexible fibers, can also lead to lung cancer and another illness known as asbestosis, a chronic lung disease. But the prognosis is the worst for mesothelioma.
“I went to my family doctor because I had a backache,” says Dianne Thurston, of Augusta. The doctor sent 71-year-old Thurston to get a chest X-ray, and found a malignant growth by the back of her lungs last September. By the time patients are diagnosed, they are usually given five to 16 months to live.
But Thurston says she hopes that her participation in clinical trials of antibiodies for the last four months, coupled with chemotherapy, will better her chances of survival, and help science. “Well, hopefully it will help other patients shrink their tumors and live longer.”
She’s not sure how she got sick from the disease but having worked as a schoolteacher for 20 years, she thinks she may have been exposed to asbestos while teaching in a couple of older schools — buildings that have since been torn down. She has not pursued legal recourse, but scores of other mesothelioma patients in Maine have.
“We’ve handled probably over 200 in the last 25 years,” says Bill Higbee, senior partner at the Topsham-based law firm Mcteague, Higbee, Case, Cohen, Whitney & Toker. Currently, he has 15 mesothelioma cases.
Ninety-five percent of his clients worked at Bath Iron Works, before the shipbuilder stopped using asbestos in new construction in the 1970s. “The shipbuilding industry and BIW in particular used a fiber called amocite asbestos one of the most toxic types of asbestos fibers around. The construction industry often uses what they call crysotile, or a mixed asbestos, and even though it does cause mesothelioma, not with the frequency of amocite fibers. ”
Higbee says many of the cases are successful, though he would not say what kind of damages have been received by his clients, whom he says are mostly widows who initiated the lawsuits while their husbands were still alive or after they had died.
Bath Iron Works spokesman Jim DeMartini refrained from commenting on the topic, saying he has not seen the report from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
Epidemologist Ki Moon Bang says that mesothelioma deaths are expected to peak in 2010, about 40 years after commercial companies started to avoid the use of asebestos. The trend is already being seen in law firms: Higbee says that the rate of new cases coming in has slowed.