Pleural plaques

This is the least serious form of asbestos disease. Plaques are scars in the lining of your lungs, visible on x-ray, but in most cases you will not know you have them. Often, you will have no breathlessness or disability. Plaques are a marker of asbestos exposure. Your chest consultant will tell you whether they are caused by asbestos. Plaques usually develop 10 to 20 years after your exposure to asbestos. Plaques are much more common than asbestosis itself, probably because you need less asbestos to cause them.

In themselves, plaques are not dangerous, but because you have been exposed to asbestos, you will probably have a small risk of more serious illness in the future. The risks, which vary from person to person, are that you may get:

• pleural effusions or pleural thickening
• asbestosis
• lung cancer caused by asbestosis
• mesothelioma

Most people worry because they have plaques. For this, Judges used to award compensation against your employers.

Asbestos Street, Prieska, South Africa. Crocidolite (blue asbestos)
was mined in this area and milled in the town.

The insurers were successful in January 2006 in stopping compensation to people with pleural plaques. We are fighting on behalf of the victim and are taking this case to the House of Lords. The Court's decision will probably not be given until 2008, so please contact us if you need further information. But in the meantime, we suggest that you contact a solicitor so at least your chance to claim can be registered with your employers and their insurers. The Law Lords may change the law back so that plaques are compensatable - courts used to award £4,000 to £6,000 for plaques on the basis that you can return should you go on to develop one of the more serious asbestos diseases and between £10,000 - £15,000 on a full and final settlement basis.

We represent two of the claimants whose cases are to be heard in the Lords and can update you as to progress.

Benign pleural effusion

This means a build up of fluid in your chest cavity. This can be treated, and you can make a complete recovery. But often, this condition progresses to pleural thickening.

Diffuse pleural fibrosis or thickening

This is more serious than plaques, because you can get pain and breathlessness. The pleura is a very thin lining between your lung and your rib cage. It can be damaged by inhaling asbestos dust. It can affect one lung or both lungs. It can get worse gradually or suddenly. There are risks of asbestosis, lung cancer associated with asbestosis, or mesothelioma.

Asbestosis

You need to have breathed in quite a lot of dust over at least several months or even a year or two to get asbestosis. Many people think asbestosis is cancer. It is not. There is a risk that you might get cancer in the future.

Nowadays, asbestosis tends to come on 20 years or more after your first contact with asbestos dust. Asbestosis is identified by x-ray, or a special scan called CAT (or CT) scan, by work history, clinical examination and lung function tests. Asbestosis is a form of fibrosis.

Asbestos fibres become stuck in your lungs and cause inflammation and scarring, affecting the efficiency of your lungs. You may have breathlessness, cough, and other symptoms. Some people with asbestosis have no symptoms or very little disability. Others are seriously breathless, have a bad cough, and other symptoms.

Asbestosis often gets worse the longer you have it, but this does not always happen. It cannot be cured.

For very mild asbestosis with little or no effect, Courts will now award about £15,000. For more advanced asbestosis, involving significant breathlessness, cough and other symptoms, Courts will award up to £60,000 for the disease itself.

If you lose your job or cannot work, or need care, you will be awarded more compensation.

You have the choice of a "once and for all" award, or of keeping open your right to return to court for more compensation if you develop a more serious illness in the future - this is called a 'provisional damages order'.

Asbestos-related lung cancer

Asbestos has been known to cause lung cancer since about 1955 or earlier. People who have asbestosis and who also smoke cigarettes are many times more likely to get lung cancer than people who have asbestosis and are not smokers. If you get lung cancer caused by asbestos, a Court will award you between £35,000 and £60,000 for the illness itself. In addition, you will get compensation for loss of earnings, and the value of care your family and friends give you, the cost of professional nursing care and any special aid/adaptations you need to buy.

Experts think blue or brown asbestos are more dangerous than white asbestos. But all forms of asbestos are dangerous, and in practice you will probably not know what type you have breathed in.

It usually takes 20 years from being exposed to asbestos before lung cancer develops.

The DWP will accept that lung cancer is caused by asbestos if you have either asbestosis or can show substantial exposure to asbestos. The rules are complicated and it is worth seeking advice before completing the forms.

In a court action, it is difficult to prove that lung cancer is caused by asbestos dust if you do not already have asbestosis. So it is difficult, but not impossible, to get compensation for lung cancer without asbestosis. But if you have inhaled a very large number of asbestos fibres after heavy exposure, most doctors now believe this can cause lung cancer without first causing asbestosis.

Claiming after death

If you die, your estate and dependants will be able to carry on with the claim. "Dependants" can mean wife, partner, children - if they relied on you for money or help. "Partner" means someone you lived with continuously for 2 years as a husband or wife or same sex partner up to the date of death.

If you were dependent on someone who has already died of asbestos disease, you can get compensation. A dependant can recover their financial loss and their loss of services. Some dependants are awarded a fixed sum of £10,000, called "bereavement".

If you are the executor of the estate of someone who died from asbestos disease, you can sue for compensation, if the person who died has not been compensated. The Estate will be compensated for the victim's pain and suffering, loss of earnings up to their death, the cost of nursing them, and the cost of the funeral.

A court action should be started within 3 years of the person's death, but judges will sometimes allow you to bring an action more than 3 years after the death. You should never assume it is too late, but get advice quickly.

Speedy claims

A specialist solicitor should be able to finish a case for someone with asbestos-related cancer within 12 months and often in 6 months or even less. Usually we finish cases within 6 months of being instructed.

Judges are sympathetic to people with such serious illnesses, and will do everything possible to have the cases heard quickly.

Your case is not likely to go to a full hearing, but the insurance company will probably not pay you until days before the case is due to be heard, and often not until the morning of the hearing itself.

Mesothelioma

Mesothelioma is a form of cancer nearly always caused by asbestos. It is usually a tumour of the pleura, which is the lining between your lung and your rib cage, but it can sometimes affect your peritoneum, the lining between your bowel and the cavity of your abdomen. On rare occasions, it may affect other parts of the body. New drugs are being developed and tested in clinical trials. New surgery techniques are being used, combined with radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy, but this work is in its early stages. Specialist doctors or nurses can control pain successfully. They are called palliative care experts. Macmillan nurses are highly trained in the management of this illness.

Mesothelioma can be difficult to diagnose, as there are many other causes of pleural thickening and pleural effusions (fluid around the lung). These conditions can be caused by other cancers, or by infections or persistent inflammation. Usually, a biopsy, or more than one biopsy, has to be done in order to diagnose mesothelioma.

Symptoms usually begin with breathlessness or with back or chest pain caused by a build up of fluid around the lung. This is called a pleural effusion. This fluid can be removed from the pleural space to relieve symptoms, and a type of surgery called pleurodesis is sometimes carried out to prevent fluid building up again in the pleural space. Patients can develop swelling and discomfort in the places where biopsies have been carried out, or surgery performed. Radiotherapy is used to treat these symptoms.

A specialist solicitor should be able to get a case to court for someone with mesothelioma within 6 to 12 months. It is important that a solicitor takes a detailed statement from the person who has mesothelioma, preferably in the early stages of the illness. Only a specialist solicitor will be able to complete the case this quickly.

You do not have to get asbestosis in order to get mesothelioma. Most people who develop mesothelioma do not have asbestosis.

Mesothelioma has no connection with cigarette smoking.

Practically all mesotheliomas are caused by asbestos exposure. It can be caused by short periods of exposure to asbestos. You might not even have worked with asbestos. People who lived near asbestos factories have developed mesothelioma. People have developed mesothelioma as a result of living with someone else who worked with asbestos and brought dust home on their clothes.

If someone dies of mesothelioma, or any other asbestos-related disease, the law says there must be an inquest, so the coroner must be told immediately, and there should be a post-mortem.

If you have a relative who died of mesothelioma, and the doctor instructed by the Coroner says that asbestos found in the lungs did not cause the mesothelioma, or the mesothelioma was not caused by work, you should get a second opinion. A specialist solicitor will get one for you.

Many types of work generated enough asbestos dust to cause mesothelioma. Garage workers, joiners, carpenters, electricians, building workers, dockers, plumbers, heating engineers, and others, are at risk. See the list of asbestos products later on.

It is predicted that in the UK the number of people who will die each year from mesothelioma will rise to about 2,700, and will not begin to fall for another 20 years.

It is rare for someone under 40 to get mesothelioma, because there is always a long delay between first exposure to asbestos and development of the illness. Some doctors think there must be a 20 year delay, but people have got this illness as early as 10 years or as late as 60 plus years after breathing in asbestos.

Knowledge of mesothelioma is more recent than knowledge of asbestosis. It has been known since 1957 or 1958 by some asbestos manufacturers, but widely known in industry since the mid 1960s, that very small amounts of asbestos dust can cause mesothelioma.

This means that if you get mesothelioma, or any other asbestos disease, because of contact with asbestos within the last 40 years, you can almost certainly get compensation through the courts if the company that exposed you, either at work, or to its asbestos products, still exists.

The difficulty you can face in getting compensation is that the firm or company may have gone out of business. Even if they have gone out of business, it is worth seeing a solicitor, because you should be able to get compensation under a special Government scheme. Or a solicitor may be able to bring the company back into existence and bring a court action against it, if the company had insurance.

Typical awards for mesothelioma itself are now £50,000 - £70,000. Extra amounts are awarded for lost earnings, care, specialist equipment, medical expenses, and for lost income, which the victim would have had in the future, but for the illness. Compensation claims for mesothelioma are frequently worth £100,000 or more.

Asbestos compensation under threat

Early in 2001, the largest single employers liability insurer for asbestos risks said it could no longer afford to pay out claims. It looked as though many asbestos disease victims would not receive compensation. Spurred on by a campaign organized by many committeed people, and in co-operation with the insurance industry, the government announced in May 2001 a new Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) to pay compensation to asbestos victims who would have lost out.

In October 2001 the largest British asbestos manufacturer (and employer) T&N Ltd (formerly Turner & Newall Limited) and its associated companies went into Administration and Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in the United States. This was a legal device designed to protect the company from asbestos disease compensation claims while it reorganized its affairs. This has meant that hundreds of British asbestos disease victims have gone uncompensated so far. T&N Ltd is setting up a Trust for asbestos disease victims worldwide. But because there are so many of them and a limited amount of money available, they are likely to receive eventually only a fraction of what they would have been awarded if it had still been possible to bring legal action against the company.

During 2002, the insurance industry challenged the entitlement of most mesothelioma victims to compensation in the Courts. They argued that because mesothelioma could in theory be caused by just one asbestos fibre, someone who had been exposed to asbestos on more than one occasion could never prove where he or she got the disease.

We went to the highest appeal court, the Law Lords, on behalf of two of our clients, Edwin Matthews and Doreen Fox. The Law Lords decided in June 2002 that any exposure that increased the risk of someone getting mesothelioma should be said to have caused the disease. The entitlement of mesothelioma victims to be compensated was preserved.

The latest battle

The House of Lords in May 2006 ruled that those who had their exposure to asbestos dust from more than one source had to sue all of them to get full compensation. This was unfair and the Government overturned this decision at the end of July by bringing in an amendment to the Compensation Act 2006.