Asbestos continues to cloud the present and the future

A recent report warns that the long latency period for asbestos-related diseases may mean that illness rates have yet to peak.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. May 10, 2004.

Brad Black, MD, a physician in Libby, Mont., is one of the lucky ones. He's breathing just fine. But he can't say the same for many of his patients.

About a quarter of the people in the area, the former home of a vermiculite mine contaminated with asbestos, now show the ill effects of exposure. Miners come to him barely able to inhale. Their spouses who washed the work clothes laden with asbestos dust and their children who played in the slag heaps are experiencing problems, too.

Dr. Black, a pediatrician who came to Libby in the 1970s, is aware that he also faces risk. He used the vermiculite in his garden. And, like everyone else in Libby, he has been breathing asbestos-contaminated air for decades. Still, he has not experienced any symptoms.

"If I was going to have any lung problems, they probably would have developed by now, but there's still the possibility of mesothelioma," said Dr. Black, currently the medical director of Libby's Center for Asbestos Related Disease.

Libby is an extreme example of the health havoc wrought by asbestos. But this hamlet, with a population of 2,000 and another 8,000 people in the surrounding areas, is not the only place in the United States touched by the contaminant. Doctors around the country report an increase in the diagnosis of people with lung diseases linked to it.

"I'm seeing a flood of them," said Alan Whitehouse, MD, a pulmonologist in Spokane, Wash. "I'm seeing more now than I ever saw in the 1970s and 1980s."