Mesothelioma Articles

Deadly stalker

Posted: May 6, 2004

Source: The Australian

HARRY (not his real name) used to be a paperboy. As a 13-year-old, Harry would do the rounds of the factories in the Brisbane suburb of Newstead selling the Brisbane Tele to the workers in James Hardie's asbestos plant.

Fifty years later, Harry, now 63, is dying of mesothelioma – the most excruciatingly painful and deadly cancer.

It incubates for 30 years or more. Then the victims rapidly shed weight. Even breathing becomes an effort as their lungs fill up with fluid. As they slowly drown, they can't eat solid food. The unbearable pain requires morphine, which in turn brings constipation. Their energy is sapped. Some have to suck in oxygen 24 hours a day.

As the tumour grows around the wall of the victim's chest it can track into the drain hole which the doctor has punched into the patient's back for the biopsy.

In some cases the tumour has to be zapped as it comes out of the body. Just to contain it.

The Helper

SHIRLEY White (her real name) is president of the Queensland Asbestos Related Diseases Support Society.

Shirley works every day of the week. For free. Her own family has been touched by mesothelioma. She's on call at night. She sits at the bedside of victims, comforting their loved ones, as they die.

"It's not just the (asbestos) workers," Shirley said yesterday, "It's the families. They get it too.

"The wives who washed their husbands' work clothes, the children who hugged their fathers when they came home from work. What's going to happen to these people?"

The Communicator

GREG Baxter (his real name) is the corporate affairs manager for James Hardie. Greg is paid to communicate with the company's investors and the press.

Baxter tried to dissuade this column from writing about James Hardie a couple of weeks ago by publishing a strident diatribe about our supposedly biased story: "No commitment to ethics and integrity," he said. "Dishonest."

This week before David Jackson QC at the NSW Government Commission of Inquiry in the Medical Research and Compensation Foundation (MRCF), Baxter's name came up in evidence.

Hardie's former asbestos litigation manager, Wayne Attril, gave evidence that a media release stating that its asbestos trust could meet "all future anticipated claims" was found to be untrue.

The press statements were "categorical" and when Attril said he complained to Baxter about the press statements he said Baxter responded that the company was "comfortable".

In James Hardie's defence – and we spoke with a plaintiff lawyer about this last night – the company which Hardie spun off to cater for the claims (Amaca) is "fairly reasonable to deal with".

The problem is that it is running out of money. Expected claims have ballooned to more than $1.1 billion and only $293 million was set aside.

The commission was set up, among other things, to determine if Hardie – through a bafflingly complex series of financial transactions – quarantined its asbestos liabilities so that it could protect itself from compensating the victims of its own products.

Still the stock price goes up. When it finally stopped making asbestos in the mid-1980s Hardie switched into fibre cement. It expanded under former boss Keith Barton into the US and has been an extremely successful building products stock ever since.

But it is uncertain whether it can escape from the long shadow of its history – no matter the complex transaction over its corporate structure.

"And you know, don't you," counsel asked Attril this week, "that it had been found in the Dust Diseases Tribunal that Hardies had actual knowledge of the dangers of asbestos in 1938? Did you know that?"

"Yes."

As Hardies tries to finesse its situation outside of the commission by debunking journalists with glib PR and a barrage of denials, while its QCs conduct lofty debate, its executives must be wondering privately why they just didn't do what CSR (the other major asbestos producer) does, and deal with the claims as they arise.

Meanwhile, in evidence heard in the commission this week, two-thirds of Hardie's asbestos costs go to the lawyers.

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