While primary exposure happens to people who work directly with asbestossecondary exposure to asbestos is just as dangerous and may happen to anyone.
Secondary exposure often occurs when workers bring home asbestos fibers on their clothes, shoes, or tools to others living in their home, according to the National Cancer Institute. Secondary exposure may also be referred to as household exposure, domestic exposure, indirect exposure, or secondhand exposure.
Is Secondary Asbestos Exposure Dangerous?
Secondary asbestos exposure can be just as dangerous as primary asbestos exposure. Indeed, repeated secondary asbestos exposure can cause the same health problems as primary exposure. And while secondary exposure is less common today than in the past, like traditional work exposure, it can take decades for the effects to become known.
Today, employers are required to provide asbestos workers with a place to change out of contaminated clothing, as well as showers to wash asbestos particles from workers’ skin and hair, employers in the past were not subject to similar regulations. Cancer and other health effects From asbestos exposure may take years or decades to develop and these past exposures may still be resulting in injuries to workers or their spouses, children, or other family members.
What are the Risks of Secondary Exposure?
The risks of primary and secondary exposure to asbestos are the same. According to the Centers for Disease Control, when asbestos fibers are inhaled, they may cause inflammation in the lungs, leading to a variety of health problems. Asbestos exposure can result in many serious health conditions, including mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosisand pleural plaques.
Who is at Risk of Secondary Exposure?
In the past, asbestos workers were more likely to be men. Their wives and children were more likely to experience secondhand exposure from asbestos particles being brought into the home. In some cases, children who were exposed to asbestos fibers when they were young developed mesothelioma or other health conditions as they got older.
Family members and roommates who live with an asbestos worker may also be at risk for secondary exposure to asbestos.
How Does Secondary Asbestos Exposure Occur?
Asbestos is a naturally occurring fibrous mineral. The fibers are rough and may break into very small pieces. The texture and size of the fiber pieces make it easy for them to attach to hair, skin and clothing, and be transported from the job site to the home.
Clothing that has been exposed to asbestos should be washed by a professional asbestos cleaner or disposed of properly. Attempting to wash contaminated clothing at home is likely to result in secondary exposure. Regular washing machines may agitate the fibers and cause them to become airborne.
Secondary exposure may also occur through asbestos fibers attached to furniture. If somebody working closely with asbestos sat on or brushed against furniture before changing out of their contaminated clothing, fibers may be left behind and transferred to other people, including those they live with.
What Are the Signs of Secondary Asbestos Exposure?
Since asbestos-related medical issues can take many years to develop, a party who has asbestos exposure symptoms might not even realize the cause of these issues. It’s common for these side effects to be misunderstood or written off as other medical conditions.
The asbestos exposure signs most often presented to doctors are coughing, chest pain, and shortness of breath. Since these can often be mild at first, the patient might think they have a cough or some other minor diagnosis.
Ultimately, exposure to asbestos can affect the lungs, leading to problems like the accumulation of fluid in the area around the lung, according to Case Studies in Environmental Medicine. Secondhand asbestos exposure can also lead to other issues in the body, such as difficulty swallowing, loss of appetite, pelvic pain, abdominal swelling, weight loss, hernia, or clubbed fingers.
Determining liability in a secondhand case is still a concern since the worker who directly interacted with various affected products might not be around. Anyone who was exposed to asbestos secondhand might not have any way to tell which products led to the initial fibers that were carried home on a family member.
Both lung cancer and mesothelioma can result from asbestos exposure. However, there are important distinctions between the two conditions and their relationship to asbestos exposure.
Lung cancer develops in the lung tissue itself, while mesothelioma develops in the lining of internal organs. Mesothelioma can develop in the lining of the lungs, particularly after asbestos exposure. Mesothelioma is almost always associated with asbestos exposure, whereas lung cancer is more commonly associated with other causes, like smoking.
Reportedly, lung cancer is most often attributed to smoking, and is the second most common kind of cancer. Around 222,500 new cases develop each year, and only a small number of these are connected to asbestos exposure.
In contrast, mesothelioma is much rarer, and is only associated with around 2,800 new cases each year, almost all of which are linked to asbestos exposure earlier in life.
Lung cancer and mesothelioma also differ in how long they take to develop. Lung cancer usually appears between 15 and 35 years after exposure to asbestos. Mesothelioma takes longer to develop — between 20 and 50 years, explains the American Cancer Society. If a patient has been diagnosed with cancer and their physician believes it may have been connected to earlier asbestos exposure, determining what kind of cancer it may be a way to determine if asbestos exposure was indeed linked to the condition.
Some of the symptoms of lung cancer and mesothelioma are similar, which can make distinguishing between the two challenging. Both mesothelioma and lung cancer tend to present with pleural effusion, or a buildup of fluid in the chest cavity. However, mesothelioma also tends to present with pleural thickening, whereas lung cancer does not. This occurs in mesothelioma when scar tissue builds up in the lining of the lungs.
Is Secondhand Exposure to Asbestos Still a Risk?
A 2017 study published in the International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health looked at the potential for secondhand exposure in Italy. The study looked at sufferers in over 1,000 cases of mesothelioma and found that 35 of them were connected to indirect or secondhand exposure. Most of the workers who were bringing home these fibers were employed in shipyards.
The fight to eliminate asbestos exposure is still happening today.
Compensation for Asbestos Exposure Victims
A growing number of people are coming forward with claims of asbestos exposure against, for instance, companies that failed to protect them. If you have been subject to secondary exposure to asbestos, you may qualify to join an asbestos exposure attack investigation and pursue compensation for your pain and suffering, health injuries, and distress.
Filing a lawsuit can be a daunting prospect, so Top Class Actions has laid the groundwork for you by connecting you with an experienced attorney. Consulting an attorney can help you determine if you have a claim, navigate the complexities of litigation, and maximize your potential compensation.