Women and Mesothelioma

If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with mesothelioma and nothing in your working life explains it, you may have a valid claim — and you may not be aware of the full range of compensation available to your family. The exposure is there. It is simply not where the traditional story says to look.

The traditional story is a man in a shipyard, a boiler room, or a mill, and it is true as far as it goes. Those cases remain the core of asbestos litigation, and this firm handles them. But the same story, told as if it were the whole story, leaves a great many people out, and most of them are women.

A woman diagnosed with mesothelioma is often asked one question at intake, whether she ever worked with asbestos, and when the answer is no the inquiry stops. She may be told she has no case. She may conclude it herself and never ask. Both are mistakes, because the question was the wrong one. The right questions are about the people she lived with, the products she used, the houses she lived in, and the buildings she worked in.

Keep in mind that none of this makes a woman's case weaker. It makes it different, and it means the evidence has to be gathered from different places.

The federal mortality data confirms that mesothelioma in women is a real and continuing presentation, and it says something about where the exposure came from.

The CDC reports that the annual number of mesothelioma deaths among women in the United States rose from 489 in 1999 to 614 in 2020, an increase of 25 percent, with 12,227 deaths over the period. The same report gives the estimated median interval from first occupational exposure to death as 32 years, with a range of 13 to 70 years, which is why a diagnosis today so often traces to exposure in the 1960s or 1970s.

The occupations recorded for those women are the striking part. Among women who died of mesothelioma in 2020 with an occupation recorded, the CDC found that homemaker was the most common, at 129 of 567 or 22.8 percent, followed by elementary and middle school teachers at 5.6 percent and registered nurses at 4.9 percent. By industry, health care and social assistance accounted for 15.7 percent and education services for 11.3 percent, ahead of manufacturing at 8.8 percent.

Homemakers, teachers, and nurses do not work with asbestos. The report itself points to the pathways that reach them, describing exposure indoors when older building materials containing asbestos are present and take-home exposure through family members exposed at workplaces outside the home, and it cites one study in which the relative risk of mesothelioma among women with a husband or father working in an asbestos-related industry increased 10-fold.

For your family, the data does one thing above all. It establishes that a woman with no industrial history and a mesothelioma diagnosis is not an anomaly. She is the most common case in her category.

There are five routes by which asbestos reached women who never worked with it, and a single life often contains more than one.

Through a family member's work. A husband, father, brother, or son in an asbestos trade came home in fiber-laden clothes, and whoever shook them out and washed them breathed the fiber on every wash day for years. The National Cancer Institute records that family members of heavily exposed workers face an increased risk of mesothelioma from fiber brought home on shoes, clothing, skin, and hair. This route has its own article, take-home and secondary exposure.

Through talc powders and cosmetics. Talc and asbestos form together in the earth, and federal testing has found asbestos in talc body powders and in makeup. A woman who powdered herself and her babies daily, and applied face powder and blush every morning for decades, carried a long, close-range exposure. See talc and baby powder and cosmetic talc and makeup.

Through household goods. Ironing board covers, stove-top pads, fireproof gloves, hair dryers, and the artificial embers in gas fireplaces were made with asbestos and shed it as they wore. The person running the house used them daily. See household products and appliances.

Through the house itself. Joint compound, floor tile, textured ceilings, siding, pipe insulation, and attic vermiculite released fiber whenever the house was sanded, scraped, or torn into, and the dust settled into every room. The woman who cleaned up after the renovation, or did the painting and patching herself, was exposed. See home renovation and building materials.

Through the buildings where women worked. Schools, hospitals, and offices built through the 1970s were built with asbestos, and the ATSDR notes that asbestos is still present in older homes and buildings. Federal law recognizes the school problem directly: the EPA explains that the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act requires public school districts and non-profit schools to inspect their buildings for asbestos-containing material. A teacher in the same classroom for thirty years, through decades of repairs and renovations, was exposed there, and so was a nurse in a mid-century hospital.

You do not have to know which of these applies. The first conversation is designed to find out.

In a conventional asbestos case the exposure history is an employment history, and it is reconstructed from employers, jobsites, union records, and co-workers. For most women, that history belongs to someone else, or else to something else entirely.

The work history that matters may be a husband's or a father's. In a take-home case the employers, the trades, the years, and above all the products that have to be identified are his. If he is living, his recollection is the most valuable evidence in the case and should be recorded early. If he has died, his history is rebuilt from Social Security earnings records, union records, service records, and the co-workers who remember which products were in use.

The exposure may be a product with no employer behind it. A talc powder, a brand of makeup, an ironing board cover. There is no personnel file for a dressing table. The evidence is the household's memory of brands and years, supported by photographs, receipts, and surviving items, and then the manufacturers' own records of what their products contained.

The exposure may be a building. A school or hospital has ownership records and inspection and renovation histories, and where federal law required inspections those records may survive. Colleagues who worked in the same building are witnesses.

The household routine is itself evidence. Who did the laundry and where. Who did the ironing and the cooking. Who cleaned up after the renovation. Who applied the powder and to whom. These details are the exposure, and more than one person in the family should write down what they remember while they can.

For families, this is the practical difference. The investigation starts at the kitchen table, with a list of the people, the products, the houses, and the buildings in a woman's life, and it builds outward from there.

Because the usual intake question fails for most women, the first conversation in these cases works through a different set. It helps to think about them before you call.

The people. Did your husband, father, brothers, or sons work in the trades, the mills, the yards, the plants, the railroads, the Navy, or auto repair, and in which years. Who did their laundry. Did they change at work or at home.

The products. Did you use talc body powder, on yourself or on children, and which brand, for how long. Which powder cosmetics did you wear, and for how many years. Did the house have asbestos ironing board covers, stove pads, fireproof gloves, or a gas fireplace with artificial embers.

The houses. Every address, with the years. Was any house renovated while you lived in it, by whom, and what was done. Was there loose vermiculite insulation in the attic. Who cleaned up.

The buildings. Where did you work, in which buildings, for how long, and were they older buildings that were repaired or renovated while you were there. A school, a hospital, an office, a store.

The medical record. The pathology and the treating records that established the diagnosis. Mesothelioma in the lining of the abdomen, peritoneal mesothelioma, has its own article, and your care team remains the source for anything about your own diagnosis and treatment.

You may not have answers to most of these. That is normal, and it is what the investigation is for. What you can do now is write down what you know and ask the family members who might know the rest.

The defendants in a woman's case depend on the route the exposure took, and a single case often names companies from more than one.

For take-home exposure, the defendants are usually the manufacturers of the asbestos products the family member worked with, which is why identifying those products matters so much. Whether a defendant owed a duty to a household member who was never on its premises is a question the states answer differently, and it is covered in the take-home article and in venue and jurisdiction.

For talc, cosmetics, and household goods, the defendants are the companies that made and sold the products and the companies that supplied the asbestos or the talc. These are product liability claims: an unreasonably dangerous product, a failure to warn of a hazard the company knew or should have known about, and negligence in what it chose to put in the product.

For the house, the defendants are the manufacturers of the building materials, many of which now pay claims through bankruptcy trusts, as described in asbestos bankruptcy trust claims.

For a building, the analysis can include the building owner as a premises defendant as well as the product manufacturers, depending on the governing state and the facts.

In every route the accountability inquiry is the same. What did the company make, what did it know about the hazard, and what did it tell the people who would breathe it. Those answers are developed from the companies' own documents, and they are the center of the case.

The deadline and venue rules for a woman's case are the same as for any asbestos case, with one addition that matters.

The limitations period generally starts at diagnosis, a wrongful death claim starts its own at the date of death, and both depend on the governing state, as set out in statute of limitations in asbestos cases.

The addition is that where the case is filed can matter more for a woman than for a tradesman. In a take-home case the states disagree about whether a duty was owed to household members at all. In a product case the companies sold nationally, and more than one state may have a genuine connection. Because a woman's case so often combines routes, the venue analysis has to account for all of them, and it is worth doing early. That analysis is covered in choosing where to file.

If you are a woman with a mesothelioma diagnosis and no jobsite to point to, or you are her husband, daughter, or son, the exposure is worth investigating. Start with the list above: the people, the products, the houses, and the buildings. Write down what you know and ask the family what they remember.

There is no fee unless we win, and nothing is owed for the first conversation. You will not be asked whether you worked with asbestos. You will be asked about your life, which is where the answer is.