Asbestos now affecting third wave of victims
Stephanie Gardiner March 30, 2012
Adventurer Lincoln Hall famously defied death on the world's highest mountain, but what eventually caused his demise was something so small he could not even see it.
Mr Hall, 56, famous for his Mount Everest expeditions and his near death experience below the summit in 2006, died last week from mesothelioma, linked to asbestos cement flat sheets used to build cubby houses with his father as a child.
Mr Hall was part of what is known as the third wave of mesothelioma sufferers; those who were exposed to asbestos fibres not as miners or workers, but as "bystanders".
The number of mesothelioma sufferers continues to rise and Nico van Zandwijk, the director of the Asbestos Diseases Research Institute, expects data to show there are between 700 and 750 new cases a year.
That data is being compiled through the Australian Mesothelioma Registry, which Professor van Zandwijk hopes will also help to understand whether enough is being done to prevent the disease.
Asbestos is in many houses and landfill sites, he said.
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This week, residents of Camellia in western Sydney, expressed their concerns about a proposal to build a waste treatment plant on a site once used to manufacture asbestos.
"It's amazing how much asbestos is around [in Australia]; it is everywhere," Professor van Zandwijk said.
"What is needed is a very good structural approach to asbestos waste, because in a way asbestos waste is comparable with nuclear waste because the dangerous potential of asbestos remains."
In recent years a different type of mesothelioma sufferer has emerged who, like Mr Hall, was exposed to asbestos through home renovations or living and working in buildings where it was present.
The first wave of sufferers were those who handled the raw material in mines and the second wave of patients were people such as builders and carpenters who worked with asbestos filled materials.
Part of the reason the number of cases continues to rise is the long gap between exposure and the development of the disease, which can be between 20 and 70 years, Professor van Zandwijk said.
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The median gap is 40 years, a period when the fibres cause chronic inflammation.
"The immune system is trying to defend or trying to eliminate that fibre, but the fibres are very persistent.
"So it is chronic inflammation during many years which eventually causes cancer.
"The mechanism of causing cancer is directly related to that inflammatory process.
"There are many inflammatory changes of those normal cells needed to become a malignant cell and that takes a long time."
The longer the fibre, the harder it is for the body to fight it off.
"They are very small and light and you can't see them with the eye and they are in the air and you can inhale them easily.
"They embed themselves in the body, not in cells.
