Global Asbestos Deaths Keep Rising

Despite increasingly strict exposure standards for asbestos, the number of asbestos-linked cancers will continue to grow because of the length of time required for them to develop, according to a symposium held at the 11th Annual Congress of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) in Berlin, Germany.

Occupational asbestos exposure in Western Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia peaked in the 1970s, but recent estimates indicate that 30,000 new asbestos-related cancers continue to be diagnosed there every year. These include 10,000 cases of mesotheliomas and around 20,000 cases of lung cancer. Moreover, doctors believe there will be a steady rise in the frequency of asbestos-related cancers until at least 2010 or 2020, since they take many years to develop. As a result, for example, mesothelioma rates are expected to rise in France by as much as 25% every three years.

A study by researchers at Erasmus Hospital (Brussels, Belgium) showed that in a randomly chosen urban population, out of 160 autopsies performed between 1998 and 2000, pleural plaques were found in 14% of subjects and concentrations of more than 1,000 asbestos bodies per gram of dry lung tissue were found in 13% of subjects. In other words, almost one person in every seven subjects bore the scars of asbestos exposure.

The symposium participants agreed that they urgently needed to determine the best ways of dealing with this time bomb. "Should we then screen systemically for the signs of past exposure in all patients who have had contact with asbestos?” asked Paul De Vuyst, co-chairman of the symposium and chairman of the Occupational and Environmental Health Group of ERS. "This is the crux of the question, and there are no uniform satisfactory answers at present.” At the close of the meeting, De Vuyst called for the creation of a European task force responsible for centralizing data and defining what groups would benefit from early screening.




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