The Asbestos Companies are to Blame

I recently read an article (Wall Street Journal: Judging Asbestos) that does a great disservice to the thousands of Americans who are diagnosed with mesothelioma and other cancers every year due to asbestos exposure.

They suggest that the asbestos bankruptcies are a concoction of unscrupulous trial lawyers. Yes, some lawyers have taken advantage of a bad situation, unscrupulously filing multiple claims or claims on behalf of people who are not actually sick. But they neglect to point out that most trial lawyers represent actual victims of asbestos exposure, and that thousands of these victims die each year and many more are sick because for decades the asbestos industry ignored -- and sometimes covered up -- the scientific evidence linking asbestos exposure to serious illness, including the fatal cancer mesothelioma, for which there is no cure.

All too often the press focuses on these few unscrupulous trial lawyers while the companies that marketed asbestos products, knowing they kill, go unnoticed. Take for instance the comments of the Director of Purchasing for Bendix Corporation (now part of Honeywell) capture the utter disregard of an industry for its workforce. This disdain is expressed over and over again in company documents spanning the past 60 years.

"...if you have enjoyed a good life while working with asbestos products, why not die from it." [Full Document]

Or what about the industry expert that predicted approximately 25,000 past and present employees will die of asbestos-related diseases,

"and the good news is that despite all the negative articles on asbestos-health that have appeared in the press over the past half-dozen years, very few people have been paying attention.". [Full Document]

I bet you didn't hear anything about that on the evening news last night.