Asbestos Latency Period

Attorney Michael Shepard

When talking about mesothelioma, there’s a concept called latency that often comes up. Latency in simple terms is the length of time between the exposure to asbestos and the onset of disease. And in most individuals for mesothelioma, you’re talking latency of anywhere between twenty and fifty years. That’s a long period of time. That’s a long time between when you’re exposed to something like asbestos and when you’re developing symptoms that show you have an asbestos related illness like mesothelioma.

And the reason for the long latency period between exposure and onset of disease is that asbestos fibers are very, very small, microscopic in some instances, and it takes them a number of years to work their way through your lung. They actually, when you breathe them in, there are a number of defense mechanisms within the body that will expel a number of the asbestos fibers, but ultimately some of them will get down into your lung, into the parenchyma of your lung. And the parenchyma, if you think of a grape, the parenchyma of the lung is like the meat inside the grape. It’s where the air exchange takes place between the air you’re breathing in, and the blood vessels.

And outside the lung is a lining called the pleura. Pleura is a very thin membrane. It acts like a piece of Teflon that lubricates the outside of your lung so that when your lung expands against the chest wall, you don’t feel any pain or aggravation.

And what happens with asbestos fibers is they work their way through the parenchyma, and they deposit over time on this pleura, on this lining of the lung which is like the skin of the grape, and those fibers will sit on that skin of the grape, on the pleura, for years or decades, and eventually the body’s defense mechanisms will start to attack those fibers, and in some people – and doctors don’t know why in some people this happens – but in some people, it will trigger a malignancy which in most cases is mesothelioma.

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