More Facts about Lung Cancer and Asbestos
Lung Cancer: The Most Deadly Cancer
Lung cancer kills more Americans each year—men and women from every ethnic group—than any other cause except heart disease. It kills more people than all other major cancers combined—more women than breast cancer, more men than prostate cancer. In the United States alone, an average of 437 people die of lung cancer every single day.
Despite the great strides being made in treatment of many other types of cancer, the lung cancer death rate for women continues to climb, and the 5-year survival of rate for lung cancer remains only 15 percent. That number is all the more shocking when compared to the 5-year survival rate for breast cancer (88 percent) and prostate cancer (99 percent). Yet these cancers continue to receive far more attention from the press and the public than lung cancer—which claims the lives of approximately 160,000 Americans every year.
Lung Cancer and Asbestos Exposure
Mesothelioma is sometimes called a “signature” disease—a disease that, by its very presence, indicates that the person was exposed to the causative agent. If someone has mesothelioma, they were almost certainly exposed to asbestos, the toxin that causes the disease. Genetic factors may make one person more susceptible the effects of asbestos exposure than another, and therefore more likely to develop mesothelioma. But generally, mesothelioma only occurs as a result of asbestos exposure.
Lung cancer, on the other hand, is a multifactorial disease—which means that a number of different factors are involved in determining your risk to lung cancer and can play a part in causing the disease. Again, genetics play a role in an individual’s susceptibility to cancer, which is why cancer seems to run in families. Environmental factors are also important in lung cancer causation, but there are a number of known environmental factors that play a part, and there may be additional unknown factors.
The single most prominent environmental factor in the development of lung cancer is smoking. Smoking contributes to a significant percentage of lung cancer cases. However, current estimates are that as many as 60 percent of new lung cancer cases involve people who never smoked or who stopped smoking decades ago. And even when smoking plays a part in lung cancer causation, it is often not the only factor at work. Tobacco smoke is by no means the only environmental factor in lung cancer causation.
Asbestos exposure is another important environmental risk for development of lung cancer. Exposure to asbestos increases your risk of developing cancer—by an average of five times the risk of a non-smoker who has not been exposed to asbestos.
Because cancer is a multifactorial disease, a combination of factors—both genetic and environmental—may contribute to developing lung cancer. And sometimes combinations of exposures or other factors are more dangerous than the sum of the individual exposures, an effect called synergy. The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary defines synergy as an “interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.”
For example, on average asbestos exposure alone makes someone five times more likely to develop lung cancer. Smoking tobacco alone makes a person ten times more likely to develop lung cancer. But for someone who smokes and was also exposed to asbestos, the risk of developing lung cancer is not 15 times higher—it’s approximately 50 times higher! Instead of adding the risks created by asbestos exposure and smoking, the risks must be multiplied because together they have a synergistic effect. Read more about asbestos and smoking.
Sources of Asbestos Exposure
Asbestos is the name for a group of naturally occurring mineral fibers that are strong, flexible and resistant to heat and corrosion. From the 1940s through the 1970s, about 27.5 million people in the U.S. suffered occupational asbestos exposure—with nearly 19 million workers having heavy exposure to asbestos. Read more about asbestos.
As those numbers suggest, a wide variety of trades exposed workers to asbestos. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has included construction workers (including plumbers, electricians, painters and other construction-related trades), demolition workers and remodelers, shipyard workers, firefighters and automobile mechanics among those at risk for dangerous asbestos exposures. See NCI Asbestos Fact Sheet. But there are others who were subject to hidden and unexpected nonoccupational sources of exposure: such as the housewife who washed her husband’s asbestos-tainted clothes, the homeowner who repaired drywall in his home or the shade-tree mechanic who changed his own brakes or clutch.
Because asbestos-related diseases like mesothelioma and lung cancer have long latency periods, decades can pass between the exposure and diagnosis. For that reason, cases of asbestos-related cancer that are being diagnosed today were caused by exposures that occurred many years ago.
The danger is not all in the past, though. Asbestos exposures are still occurring today. Although more than 40 countries have banned asbestos, the United States is not one of them. Its use has been prohibited solely in certain named products or classes of products. See EPA Asbestos Materials Bans: Clarification. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that the United States imports about 3,000 tons of raw asbestos every year to be used in the manufacture of products like coatings and roofing materials, gaskets, packing and friction products. Asbestos is also imported in products that are manufactured overseas.
