Where do the Children Play?

admin | Jun 15, 2009 | Comments 6

At first they suspected ovarian cancer, a common misdiagnosis for female mesothelioma patients. It wasn’t until after they operated that her doctors realized it was something else, and even then, Gundlach says, they had to refer to medical reference books to finally determine she had peritoneal mesothelioma.
But one can hardly blame her doctors for being confused. For one, peritoneal mesothelioma is a fairly rare form of cancer, striking only about 100 to 500 people in the United States per year.
Secondly, mesothelioma almost always effects people in their 60s.
But some have begun to notice a dip in the age of people mesothelioma is effecting.
Mary Hesdorffer, a nurse practitioner and the Medical Liaison for the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation (MARF), says, “We are finding younger and younger people with mesothelioma.”
She says that as of yet there are no available statistics to show how many people in their 30s or younger have been diagnosed with mesothelioma, but she tells the stories of people she has come into contact with.
She talks about one man who was diagnosed at 27-years-old, “His exposure was actually traced back to his grandfather, who had a home lab and was working on asbestos slurries.”
Another woman, she says, had a playpen near the laundry area in her grandparent’s home. Her grandfather worked with asbestos, “and when the grandfather would come home from work, the grandmother would shake the dust out before putting them in the washer.”
And then there’s Zaida Mattson, a Boulder, Colo. girl who was diagnosed at age 3 with peritoneal mesothelioma. Hesdorffer says doctors are at a loss to explain that case, considering mesothelioma is supposed to have a latency period of at least 20 years.
Dr. Brad Black, director of the Center for Asbestos Related Disease (CARD) in Libby, Montana, says he’s also noticed that the average age of mesothelioma patients has dipped. Although he has not seen any patients as young as Gundlach, he says the average age of patients has dropped from 60 to 50 at CARD.
There are a number of potential causes for younger people being diagnosed.
Hesdorffer believes part of it could be that people are starting to get better information, because of advances in technology. She believes it is possible that in the past people may have been diagnosed with other forms of cancer by doctors who were unaware of mesothelioma.
Another more alarming line of thinking is that the last wave of people with asbestos-related disease were older when they first came into contact with it. Specifically, they were at working age. Asbestos-related disease usually takes anywhere from 20 to 40 years after exposure to manifest, so it’s not surprising these workers, starting jobs in their twenties and thirties, wouldn’t see disease until their sixties.
But the asbestos products they made were used extensively across the country.
Materials like Zonolite were put into attics and lawn care products, chemicals like Monokote were sprayed onto buildings, other asbestos products were used in drywall and as pipe lining. There are also numerous sites around the country where asbestos was processed and products were manufactured.
And there are places, such as El Dorado, Calif., where tremolite asbestos is naturally occurring, and has even been found next to a high school.
Hesdorffer points to one possibility for future exposures to asbestos.
“The trend in the U.S. now is home remodeling,” she says. “People are just breaking into walls and taking down ceilings in older homes with no protection, and no realization of the risks that are posed, and I have a feeling that from this we are going to see a big onset of new cases of mesotheliomas.”
People of all ages are now being exposed, and recent studies, such as one which Dr. Black helped author, are showing that even short-term exposures to asbestos can cause mesothelioma.
“Once asbestos is banned,” says Hesdorffer, “we will still see mesotheliomas, because asbestos is still in our environment.”

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Tags: Asbestos • mesothelioma • Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation

Where do the Children Play?

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