By now you must be certainly asking about the ways that this deadly condition can be cured. Well, to cut a long story short, there is no permanent and standardized cure for mesothelioma, and the sole reason for this is the fact that mesothelioma cannot be detected before decades of it has entered into your system. Also, many of the symptoms that are atypical of mesothelioma are not solely mesothelioma centric. Symptoms like shortness of breath, blood in the sputum, pleurisies or fluid in the lungs and so on. All these symptoms can be mistaken for a thousand other conditions. Of course, different forms of mesothelioma have their own specific symptoms, but again, most of them are not mesothelioma centric. For treatment, there is the usual stock of chemotherapy as well as radiation. Surgery is usually performed in the most drastic of situations, but is not that effective as the other two treatments mentioned. With chemotherapy and radiation there is a much higher incidence of being able to increase the patient’s lifespan by five years or more. With surgery that extension rate is much less. Again, there are other treatment methods like immunotherapy that has been making progress in this field as well.
Dr. Paul Sugarbaker has been a pioneer in the field of mesothelioma treatment for years. He has evolved new methods of surgery and ways of treating the carcinogenic cells by using modes of radiation and chemotherapy. He has been able to make immense progress in a field that had once been dominated by hopelessness and despair. He developed these methods at the Washington Cancer Institute. Doctors have also been searching for methods through which the condition can be detected at a much earlier stage, that is, a stage where the mutations will not have taken place yet. Asbestos takes over one’s DNA. Now you know why mesothelioma is rightly called the scourge of the 21st century…
Next comes the question of exposure. Mesothelioma was a rare cancer which is unfortunately losing its position as one, as day by day more and more people are revealed to be suffering from the condition. So how are such staggering numbers of people becoming exposed to such a deadly mineral? And if this mineral is airborne, why is every single person in this world not mesotheliomic by now? To answer these questions, let me take you back into time as history will reveal how many people fell prey to such atrocities and perhaps it is then that you will realize that human atrocities extend far beyond wars and genocide. Veiled by civilization, people and corporations have committed many crimes for materialistic reasons.
Most of us know what the Industrial Revolution was all about in the early days of modern civilization. With the invention of a multitude of machines, there was a sudden boom in industry and production of goods finally attained new levels in terms of both quantity and quality. As a result, requirement for raw material also increased. In the late 1800s, the potential of asbestos as an industrial material was discovered. With the ongoing Industrial Revolution, new inventions in science enabled the maximization of asbestos use in the industry. However, by the early years of the 20th century, different medical organizations in England began to document the deaths of industrial workers who had been exposed to asbestos. By 1917, this information had been passed on to the United States as well. From the 1920s, different medical journals like the British Medical Journal and other research organizations began to publish the results of various experiments that had been conducted to test the hazardous quality of asbestos. The backlash from the big corporations and industries started from the 1930s onward, spearheaded by companies like Johns Manville which was a major asbestos company. Asbestos was being commercially mined and was also being used as a raw material, resulting in huge profit margins. Now, desperate to protect their profits and reputation, these corporations tried to suppress these results which revealed the deadly nature of asbestos. They bribed people, tampered with test results and even released false evidence to prove to their workers and the world in general that "the hazardous nature of asbestos was merely an exaggeration," in spite of blatant medical evidence which proved that workers who were being exposed to asbestos were dying out of conditions like asbestosis, mesothelioma and a variety of other related conditions. To protect their industries and their profits, these corporations would not reveal to their workers that they were being exposed to asbestos, and neither would they implement any safety measures like protective clothing or warning signs as these might scare off the workers. Thus the lives of innumerable workers were being risked at the altar of materialism.
Many corporations could get away with it because the symptoms would not manifest until decades later. Editors were instructed to stop publishing incriminating articles against asbestos, while some articles were modified. Test results which were sponsored by asbestos companies as a so called "goodwill gesture" were tampered or suppressed if they were incriminating. Asbestos was finally banned in 1989, following almost ten years of legislation. But the worst thing is, even though asbestos was banned in 1989, the EWG Action Fund report states that 29 million pounds of asbestos had been imported into the United States for industrial use, in as late as 2001!
This kind of inhuman behavior just shows the level that mankind has sunk to. Men are willing to sacrifice, or rather cold bloodedly ruin the lives of thousands of others, just to protect their own interests. As a result of this atrocity millions of industrial workers and their families have been exposed to mesothelioma. It is not only in the industries that this has occurred. Asbestos has been used in ships and submarines as an insulating material. Therefore thousands of navy veterans who had decided to serve their country during World War II as well as the Vietnam War have been diagnosed with mesothelioma today. And these were the very men who had risked their lives to go and serve their country during times of crisis.
Are you one of these numerous people who has fallen to such a crime? Were you exposed to such a deadly environment for years without even knowing about it? Then it is time for you to stand up for your rights, as clichéd as that might sound. This is to make you aware of what has gone on in corporate conference rooms behind closed doors while you worked for these very people and contributed to their burgeoning profit statistics. Stand up against these people by using methods of mesothelioma litigation because these are the people who should pay for your medical bills, and all the chemotherapy sessions that you need to go in for. They earned those millions of dollars because of your hard work and it is payback time for all of them. I will give you an appalling example to prove my point. The president of the infamous Johns Manville had said that the managers of some the other asbestos companies were fools because they had notified their employees about the asbestos effects! When one of his own managers asked him, "Do you mean to tell me you would let them work until they dropped dead?" The response is reported to have been, "Yes. We save a lot of money that way." This is according to the testimony by Charles H. Roemer, Deposition taken April 25, 1984, Johns-Manville Corp., et al v. the United States of America, U.S. Claims Court Civ. No. 465-83C. Various socially motivated authors have written books exposing the entire "Asbestos Cover Up." These include Barry I. Castleman’s Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects, David Kotelchuck’s "Asbestos: The Funeral Dress of Kings and Others" in "Dying for Work: Workers’ Safety and Health in Twentieth-Century America", ed. by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz and Paul Brodeur’s Outrageous Misconduct: The Asbestos Industry on Trial.
To Be continued...
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