What Is Secondary Asbestos Exposure?

There’s more than one way that a person can be exposed to asbestos. We typically think of people working on car brakes or working on construction or working on electrical items or working on whatever it may be, having the direct exposure from their work on or with the product. Another topic of exposure that we encounter all the time is what we call secondary exposure or sometimes it’s called take-home exposure, and there are really two types of secondary exposure that come to my mind. One is, like, for example, we represent a lot of veterans who were exposed to asbestos on Navy ships. These ships have close quarters. They’re right on top of each other frequently. And you may have a person working in the boiler room, for example, and it gets dusty and although, and there are other shipmates on the ship that aren’t necessarily doing the work, but are there in close proximity to the work that’s being done and experience the exposure themselves. So that’s one way. Another example of secondary exposures and brake work. We have a lot of cases where people back, especially back in the 50s and 60s, a lot of men and women did their own brake jobs and it seems like if you knew how to do a brake job, you did the brake jobs for everybody on, on the block, and those are commonly referred to as shade tree mechanics or frequently or whether it’s a lifetime mechanic who did brake jobs every single day. Most of the time they have a helper that will be involved in handing them the parts or blowing out the dust from the drum or sweeping up the residue after the brake job. That’s another example of secondary exposure, and those are just as lethal as direct exposures and frequently form the basis of asbestos claims.