What Is Mesothelioma?

Mesothelioma is a malignancy of either the pleura (the membrane that separates the rib cage from the outer surface of the lungs) or the peritoneum (the membrane that surrounds the abdominal cavity). Mesothelioma’s principal cause is exposure to asbestos.

The vast majority of mesotheliomas diagnosed in the United States are caused by asbestos exposure. Besides the severity of the disease, however, there is another significant difference between mesothelioma and the other asbestos-related diseases that have, historically, been the basis of most of the asbestos personal injury litigation in this country, namely asbestosis, pleural scarring and lung cancer. That difference can be called, for lack of better terminology, the exposure threshold. The other diseases, whose victims have generally made up the bulk of asbestos lawsuit plaintiffs, generally do not occur in the absence of relatively high “occupational” doses of exposure.

In other words, those are diseases that occur in people who were employed in shipbuilding, construction trades, or workers in factories that made asbestos-containing products. While these workers also contract mesothelioma at a rate many times that of general population, mesothelioma asbestos cancer is unique among asbestos-related diseases in that it can be caused by extremely low doses of exposure. It is, therefore, occurring at an increasing rate among people whose only exposure to asbestos was light or intermittent — the person may not be aware they were ever exposed.

The “next wave” of mesothelioma victims are people whose only exposure to asbestos may have been to work in or live in a building that had previously installed asbestos fireproofing or insulation present. These cases can be difficult to prosecute against the asbestos industry, because it is much tougher to establish the identity of the asbestos product to which the person was exposed. It can, however, be done in many cases if the proper effort is put into the investigation.