Former Plumber Killed By Asbestos Cancer Mesothelioma
Horndean, UK—After a recent inquest investigated the life and death of a man who was diagnosed with malignant pleural mesothelioma, the coroner issued a ruling of death as a result of industrial disease.
Frederick Lockie worked as a plumber throughout his career, beginning as an apprentice when he was very young. During his apprenticeship and in the years following, he was exposed to asbestos on a regular basis. Asbestos, an organically occurring mineral compound which has a number of remarkable qualities – including resistance to heat, flame, electricity and corrosion, flexibility and durability – and which has been widely used for insulation purposes. Any place you find hot water, steam or fire, there’s usually asbestos as well. This means that plumbers, steamfitters, pipefitters, shipbuilders and other manual laborers would have come into contact with asbestos-containing materials quite frequently, especially before they began to be phased out in the 1970s and 1980s.
Exposure to asbestos has been linked to a number of different diseases, the most devastating of which may be the cancer mesothelioma. Mesothelioma occurs when microscopic, airborne asbestos fibers are inhaled, and make their way into the tissue surrounding the lungs and lining the chest cavity. There they can cause the surrounding cells to become malignant and replicate unpredictably.
Mesothelioma is an unusual cancer in that it can remain latent with a person’s body for up to half a century after the first exposure to asbestos. When it finally does become symptomatic, the symptoms can often be mistaken for those of another respiratory illness, and therefore the disease is frequently misdiagnosed.
Lockie was 68 when he died. Said his wife, Pauline Lockie, “He didn’t deserve to die, he was a lovely man.”
Currently, there is no cure for mesothelioma, and the cancer comes with a very short life expectancy rate; most patients do not live beyond two years after their diagnosis.
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