The Stalking Cancer: Mesothelioma

There is a cancer that can stalk you for most of your lifetime. Once the seeds of this malignancy are planted in your body, it can lie in wait for twenty, forty, or even sixty years. While you carry on with your life, it slumbers.

Then, one day, it awakes and attacks you. It eats your body from the inside out, starting in either your chest or your abdomen but rapidly spreading. It can even devour your bones. There’s no way of stopping it, often no way to even slow it down. Within months, most patients are dead.

Mesothelioma is a vicious, aggressive cancer. It is not caused by smoking. It has no cure. Thankfully, mesothelioma is rare, with fewer than 4,000 new cases diagnosed each year in the United States. But for each of those patients, the diagnosis of mesothelioma is a certain death sentence.

Sometimes a cause cannot be found for mesothelioma. Sometimes it just happens. But 80% of mesothelioma cases are traced to asbestos exposure.

The exposure could have happened anywhere—on the job, at school, at home. Many times, mesothelioma victims are industrial workers, such as insulators, pipefitters, and boilermakers, who handled asbestos at work before its use was restricted in the mid-1970s. These industrial workers breathed in large amounts of asbestos fibers for many years, and their danger is obvious.

But those workers also took asbestos fibers home with them, on their clothing and on the seats of the family car. Their spouses and children also breathed those fibers, often when shaking out work clothes before washing them, sometimes just from giving Dad a hug before he showered after work. It didn’t take many asbestos fibers to cause mesothelioma, and these family members are also dying from this cancer.

It takes many years for mesothelioma to develop. Twenty years between breathing asbestos fibers and the diagnosis of mesothelioma is common, and sometimes the wait has been as high as sixty years. For all those asbestos workers and their families, the knowledge that mesothelioma could strike at any time is like a time bomb in the back of their minds, just waiting to go off.

Breathing asbestos fibers can cause other, non-cancerous lung problems, such as asbestosis and asbestos-related pleural disease. None of those conditions can be cured, either. But those diseases can be helped with medication or with physical therapy. People can live with them. Only mesothelioma is always fatal.

And this horrible epidemic among industrial workers and their families could have been prevented. Both the government and science knew, as long ago as 1906, that asbestos was a lethal substance. But no regulations were passed in the United States to protect industrial workers until the mid-1970s. Australia and Europe took even longer to protect their workers. Asbestos is still mined in Africa, and industrial products containing asbestos are being shipped to developing nations. The cycle of workers and their families breathing asbestos fibers, and dying many years later of mesothelioma, will happen again in other parts of the world.