How To Determine the Source of Asbestos Exposure

Frequently, when we get contacted by clients who have been diagnosed with mesothelioma, the job is to try to figure out how they were exposed. And it’s not always readily apparent how the person was exposed to asbestos. I’m mindful of a specific case I recently handled involving a 54-year-old banker. He played college football, then he went into the banking business. He was never around construction, he was never around plumbing or electricity, didn’t do any of the typical types of works where one is exposed to asbestos. So the job was to figure out how did this person, this client, get mesothelioma? How was he exposed asbestos? As it turns out, his father worked for a railroad as a carman and, and train brakes have have asbestos containing pads just like car brakes. And this family lived in a very small 1,500 square foot house, multiple kids. This client’s father would come home from work in his work clothes, roll around on the floor playing with the kids or lying on the furniture, and it, that is how this, our client, was exposed to asbestos in that circumstance. That’s what we call take-home exposure and it’s an example of take-home exposure. And so as a young child, and when when people are more vulnerable, arguably in the medical literature to the effects of asbestos exposure. He was breathing and inhaling asbestos fibers from his father’s clothes. Another common example is for wives or females in a household back in the earlier years, many, the females in the house frequently handled a lot of the clothes washing. So a husband or whoever they were living with, a brother, would come home from work and being exposed to asbestos. The female, that could be a male, but back, you know, years ago, that was frequently one of the things that the females in the household did, would shake out the clothes, you know, shake the dust off them and put them in the washer to and that entrained the asbestos fibers into the air inhaled by the person doing the clothes and ultimately led to mesothelioma. So that’s just another example of take-home exposure.