More than eight years after the asbestos plight of Libby, Montana came to national and international attention, the clinic in this small Montana town continues to treat dozens of patients with mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases, the legacy of more than 70 years of vermiculite mining done here.

According to the Billings Gazette, the Center for Asbestos Related Disease continues to track about 1,500 patients and works with other organizations to help develop new treatments and maybe someday find a cure for this aggressive, debilitating cancer.

Dr. Brad Black, who came to Libby in 1977 as a pediatrician, heads the clinic and will be a keynote speaker at an upcoming medical history conference in Bozeman in late April. Black and his former partner, an internist, began attempts in 1980 to have the mine owner, W.R. Grace, screen their employees for asbestos-related diseases. Grace wasn’t always cooperative.

“By the 1980s, the state health department also was aware of high levels of asbestos in Libby,” Black told the Gazette. The situation was a “public-health failure all the way through,” he added.

By the 1990s, people who hadn’t even worked at the mine were being sickened. When the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a series of articles on the deaths of nearly 200 people and the sickening of many more in Libby in a 1999 edition, the town’s plight came to light. Libby soon became an EPA Superfund site and clean-up began. But it was too late for many.

“We knew then that we had a large problem and expected to see a lot more” [asbestos-related diseases], said Black, who explains that the Center for Asbestos Related Disease is a spin off of the local hospital and now treats only those who live in Libby or once did. The center is funded by insurance payments that W.R. Grace has been making since 2001. Other funding sources are needed, says Black.

Research conducted at the Center, Black explains, is very important in that Libby asbestos is different from the most widely found asbestos and has never been studied before. Libby asbestos is hard and needle-like; easier to inhale and quicker to penetrate than the more commonly used chrysotile asbestos.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.