Mesothelioma and Smoking

Attorney Michael Shepard

Mesothelioma is not related to smoking, however, most people who have mesothelioma did smoke at one point in time. And there are also a number of people who worked around asbestos who have other cancers of the lung that aren’t mesothelioma, and adenocarcinoma, or another type of tumor.

Smoking plays an important role in asbestos exposure, and it’s often overlooked or oftentimes the asbestos exposure is overlooked because the focus is on smoking so strongly. But in the case of mesothelioma where smoking does not play a role, or in the case of a different type of lung tumor where there was someone who both smoked and was exposed to asbestos, it’s important to understand the relationship between smoking and asbestos exposure.

Most of the typical asbestos victims smoked. When you enlisted in the Navy, they gave you a carton of cigarettes. When you worked in the building trades or in the shipyards, most of the guys smoked. If you didn’t smoke, by the time you were on a jobsite for a week or two you were probably smoking. Someone was giving you a cigarette at lunch and you were puffing away on breaks.

And the reason that guys who were smoking have a greater chance of disease is because there’s what’s called a synergistic effect between smoking and asbestos-related diseases. If you look at the risk of developing a lung cancer from smoking alone and you say that it’s approximately five times the nonsmoker’s chance of developing disease, and you look at the chance of developing cancer from asbestos exposure alone and you say that that’s also five times a non-asbestos exposed person, you don’t add the two of them together when you are both smoking and working around asbestos.

You multiply them. It’s a synergistic effect. So five and five aren’t ten. Five and five are twenty-five. So that you’ve got twenty-five times the chance of developing asbestos-related disease than does someone who neither smoked nor worked around asbestos exposure.

And that’s important, because that is a pathway for disease that is often overlooked and is often minimized when you’re talking about the causation and why you ended up with the disease that you ended up with.

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