Mesothelioma & the Military: Moving to a Safe Environment
Nobody does it better or more often than a military
family.“It” is packing up and moving
house, family and expectations from one military community to another as the enlisted
member of the family follows a career. Military
housing built today is often a far stretch from the hastily constructed
multi-family units of the 1950s and 1960s, but many of the older structures are
still in use.Two of the cautionary
steps that should accompany every move are an inquiry into the age of the home
you’re moving into and an inspection to determine whether there is asbestos
present.
Any structure put up prior to 1980 is a good prospect for a
building containing asbestos products.The
number of items containing asbestos that you can find in a typical home of that
era is unnerving.Asbestos roofing,
flooring, ceiling tiles, wallboard, insulation, caulking and sealants were in
common usage.The EPA compiled extensive
information about asbestos
in the home, still relevant for any home that has been standing for thirty
years or more,
Asbestos in the
Military
Asbestos became a national health issue in the late
twentieth century because of the tens of thousands of Americans who developed
illnesses as a result of inhaling or ingesting asbestos fibers.Those tiny fibers are given off by asbestos
that is crumbling from age or exposure, or that is disturbed in such a way that
it gives off dust.That can happen as
easily in a home with old asbestos insulation as it can in an industrial
setting where there is asbestos insulation on hot boilers or pipes.
In fact it was boilers and pipes that led to the massive
exposure of Navy veterans from twentieth century service to develop asbestos
related diseases, the worst of which is mesothelioma
cancer.Every Navy vessel commissioned
between 1930 and the early 1970s was loaded with asbestos insulation in the
engine room.Boilers and heat generating
components were coated with asbestos, as were pipes that ran through the
ship.Hulls and compartments were lined
with asbestos for the purpose of fire control.Many of those ships are still active and in some, the asbestos will
never be completely gone.The USS
Enterprise still has a trained asbestos removal crew on board
for instances when a crewmember comes across a pocket of asbestos that hasn’t
been safely disposed of.
The Consequences of
Asbestos Exposure
The two worst diseases that result from inhaled asbestos
fibers are asbestosis and mesothelioma cancer.Most often, mesothelioma
will strike the membrane surrounding the outside of the lungs – a membrane
called the pleura.Eventually the cancer
cells will cause the accumulation of fluid between the lungs and the chest
wall, a condition called pleural effusion that causes shortness of breath and
chest pain.
While asbestosis is not malignant, it scars the lungs so
that breathing capacity is greatly reduced.These are the diseases that have caused hundreds of thousands of
Americans to file claims against the asbestos companies for liability
compensation.Hundreds of thousands of
those claims have been paid.The federal
government has finally acknowledged the dimensions of this public health
disaster by charging the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
(NIOSH) to tackle existing asbestos hazards throughout the country, to
formulate occupational
guidelines for avoiding asbestos exposure and to work with the EPA on
getting some of the mine sites cleared up.
Navy Service and Toxic Ships
A substantial proportion of the people who have lost their
health to asbestos are veterans – about thirty percent of the total.That percentage is remarkably high, and of
those veterans the large majority served in the Navy.It’s important to know about the dangers of asbestos
to your family today, and it’s also important to be familiar with the mesothelioma symptoms
of the malignant type, like so many Navy families, you have a veteran in one of
the older generations.
The Veterans Affairs bureaucracy has been skittish about
acknowledging military responsibility for mesothelioma.While they treat respiratory diseases of all
types in veterans returning from many different overseas assignments, their
position on disability for mesothelioma victims is that the veteran is only
eligible if he or she can prove that the asbestos exposure occurred during
active service.That is virtually impossible;
especially because mesothelioma symptoms won’t appear for years and even
decades after the asbestos exposure has occurred.
Fair Compensation
What the VA will suggest is that a veteran
suffering from mesothelioma file a claim against the asbestos
companies.They have basically accepted
responsibility for the health problems their products have created and many of
them have set up billion dollar trusts to pay health related liability
claims.An enormous number of Americans
have filed claims with those trusts and thousands of them are veterans. If you have a case for compensation due to an
asbestos related disease, line up some mesothelioma
legal help to get your claim filed and paid in a timely manner.