Asbestos World Watch

In the UK, due to the lengthy process of filing in civil courts, the Department of Societal Development has made available £10k to those suffering from mesothelioma. The life expectancy for those suffering from mesothelioma is only 9 to 18 months following diagnosis. With this prognosis, most mesothelioma patients might not live to see the settlement of a civil lawsuit. The funds will be given within weeks after diagnosis to provide compensation to assist in treating the deadly form of cancer caused by asbestos exposure.

October 1st, 2008, marked the first day that a lump compensation would be made available to those who are afflicted with mesothelioma regardless of the source of asbestos exposure. This has some sufferers worried that their final benefits under the government’s lump sum program will be less than compensation they would have earned directly from their former employers. The payouts that would have gone to some mesothelioma and asbestosis patients will be used in order to fund the government’s lump sum program, and this lowers these patients’ final compensation amounts.

The government claims that this taking of compensation funds from asbestosis victims from former employees is an unintended consequence of the lump sum law, but advocacy groups for victims believe this to be a deliberate act from the government upon the victims.

“The government never made it clear when it received so many plaudits for introducing the new scheme that it would use compensation from some asbestosis victims and some mesothelioma sufferers who worked for T&N to fund the new scheme. We are calling on government to take immediate steps to stop funding the new scheme by reducing further small amounts of compensation received by asbestos victims, ” said Tony Whitston, chairman of the Asbestos Victims Support Group Forum.

Targets of the government’s actions seem to be former employees of Turner and Newall. The chairman of Save Spooden Valley, a group supporting former workers at Turner and Newall, said, “the deductions from what was already a relatively low amount of compensation can mean that asbestos cancer victims get a pittance.”

In other news affecting UK workers exposed to asbestos, as of the beginning of October 2008, UK employers will no longer be required to store their insurance records for 40 years as they had been legally bound to do up to this point. This is a crushing blow to those who might seek asbestos claims against these companies, since it will be more difficult to trace incidents of asbestos-related diseases through the company records.

Time would be wasted in compensation claims, and it could be extremely difficult if not impossible to track down and receive compensation from insurers, said a leading industrial diseases lawyer with Irwin Mitchell, Geraldine Coombs.

Time is of the essence when seeking asbestos claims, since the claimant is typically in the latter stages of an asbestos-caused disease, such as mesothelioma. Mesothelioma often does not develop for ten to twenty years after exposure. This is the paramount reason that many feel employers should still be required to keep their records for at least 40 years. An asbestos victim could have been exposed when he was a worker at a factory 30 years prior to his diagnosis.

In JAPAN, local government inspections are being closely scrutinized after they failed to detect asbestos present in 53 buildings the inspections ruled as safe. This poses a serious risk to those working the those buildings. Exposure to asbestos has been linked to the development of many deadly lung diseases.

At the urging of the Education, Science, and Technology Ministry and the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry, asbestos inspections began being contracted by local governments to outside firms in February 2008. Until then, it was believed that three types of asbestos found had not been used in Japan, but a recent discovery of those forms of asbestos prompted the testing.

Of the 120 local governments reporting their results, 114 provided valid test results. From February through July 2008, 110 buildings were found to have asbestos even though tests conducted in 2005 reported them to be asbestos-free. At the time, inspectors were only looking for types of asbestos thought to have been used in Japan. The tests done in 2005 could also only detect concentrations of asbestos greater than 1 percent; however, the most recent tests indicate that while many of the 110 buildings had lower asbestos readings that might not have been detectible in 2005, at least 53 of the buildings did have asbestos concentrations in excess of 1 percent.

The asbestos-riddled buildings are scheduled to be demolished with a peak in the deconstruction around 2020.

In CANADA, a $60,000 fine was paid by the City of Kingston after it pleaded guilty in the asbestos exposure of city workers conducting work on a public utilities building.

Prior to work beginning, the building was tested for asbestos. Even though the tests returned negative results, not all of the surfaces were properly tested. During the renovations, a worker noted material that appeared to contain asbestos, but the piece was not tested for three weeks.

Air testing was done on June 13, 2007, and found the building to be contaminated, but the damage had been done by that time. The city workers had already been on the site without asbestos protective equipment for three weeks.

The charges against the city were failing to detect asbestos on the job site.

---

Bookmark This Article:
| del.icio.us: | Digg: | Technorati: | Newsvine: | Reddit: | Furl: | | Stumble Upon: | Yahoo!: | Google: |

---