Articles Posted in Asbestos Exposure

With a population shift favoring urban habitation, parts of the city that people had little desire to move to are suddenly becoming expensive places to rent or buy.  Because of this demand, older homes and structures are constantly being renovated. This redevelopment has been good for the city, but has also resulted in serious asbestos exposure risks for Boston construction workers.

Old, rundown residential buildings being gutted to the frames and completely renovated into luxury apartments of condominiums. Land developers are purchasing abandoned factories and warehouses and converting them into high-end residential units. Some buildings are simply too far gone, so the land development firms will simply purchase them so they can be razed with new mixed use buildings constructed in their place.  Mixed use has become a big thing these days where there are retail shops, restaurants, and supermarkets on the lower levels and apartments on the top floors.  There are even some buildings with bars and restaurants on the roof.

Asbestos in building materials was common during the era in which these older buildings were initially constructed.

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Boston is a city of buildings that were constructed at a time when asbestos was heavily used in virtually all aspects of construction. Yes, there are historical buildings in Beacon Hill that were built at time before the industrial revolution, but many of the buildings in our city were constructed during the Victorian era at the heart of the industrial revolution in the United States and Western Europe.  This is the reason we have so many Victorian style buildings and Queen Ann Victorians with large round towers and ornate exteriors.

As time went on, and newer buildings were constructed including the three deckers we find all over Boston, asbestos was still used heavily. It was used because of its abundance, which made it cheap, and the fact that it is naturally resistant to heat, fire, caustic chemicals, and electricity.  It is also an excellent chemical bonding agent, as was discovered later.  For this reason, asbestos fibers were added to many different construction products. It was used in flooring materials including tiles, and wallboard materials, as drywall was replacing plaster as the material of choice, and wall joint compounds.  Continue reading

When a person is diagnosed with any type of cancer, especially very aggressive malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM), one of the most important questions a victim and his or her family will often have for an oncologist is, “How advanced is the cancer?”  There are questions about how long the victim has left to live and if the cancer can be cured or treated.

While the prognosis for malignant pleural mesothelioma is often not very good, and the victim may have only a very short time left to live if the cancer was not caught early enough, to give the most accurate answer possible, an oncologist will have to stage the cancer.  We often hear the term Stage 3 or Stage 4 cancer or even end-stage cancer, but we may not really know what those terms mean. Continue reading