On August 6, we posted news of the availability of this monograph in Bangla. Now available online at WorldAsbestosReport.org is a translation of this work into Chinese which will make it more accessible to the largest currently at-risk national population in the world.

Coming soon will be a new monograph edited by David Allen and Laurie Kazan-Allen of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat titled India’s Asbestos Time Bomb. Look for this on September 25. Our firm, through its Foundation, is proud that our support of IBAS over the past 10 years has helped make it possible for it to publish works of this quality. As always, your comments are welcome.

Each year, the Stanford Law School sponsors a two-day student-organized conference for over 250 law students, attorneys, and academics from around the country devoted to building a community of those committed to using the law for positive social change. This year’s conference, titled "Shaking the Foundations: The West Coast Progressive Lawyering Conference," will be held at Stanford October 3 and 4. We are pleased and proud to once again be a financial sponsor of this event and participate in the proceedings, including the career forum on Friday, October 3.

The conference features an opening keynote address by Vincent Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has led the legal battle over events at Guantanamo, with panelists including distinguished faculty from U.C. Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and Duke University. Also featured is Henry Weinstein, a distinguished and nationally respected reporter on legal matters for the Los Angeles Times.

For additional details of the program and how to register, click here.

Over the last 30 or so years, I’ve represented family members of mesothelioma patients who themselves develop mesothelioma, and so have other plaintiffs attorneys.

Doctors and researchers working with the victims of mesothelioma began to publish reports of clusters of the disease. A 2004 survey of 610 pleural mesotheliomas (Bianchi, Ind Health 2004 Apr 42(2):235-9: Familial Mesothelioma of the Pleura) found 40 familial cases.  While it is likely that shared asbestos exposure is a major factor, researchers are now exploring the possibility that genetic factors might play a role in determining the susceptibility to asbestos-related cancer. A recent article explores this possibility (Ugolini, Mutat Res 2008 Mar-Apr 658 (3):162-71: Genetic susceptibility to malignant mesothelioma and exposure to asbestos: the influence of the familial factor).

Ugolini analyzed cases of clustering in reported medical literature and concluded that the available medical literature supports the hypothesis that familial clustering of malignant mesothelioma is largely attributable to shared asbestos exposure.  The additional contribution of factors dealing with genetic susceptibility may also play a role.  This is important as the understanding of the genetic profiling of malignant mesothelioma may lead to new preventive and therapeutic treatments for this devastating disease, at least in some cases.

Anything we can learn about mesothelioma’s development can only be helpful in the worldwide effort to find a cure.  It remains true, however, that the best treatment is still prevention, so efforts to ban asbestos and protect workers and their families from all exposures must remain our goal.

Last year, we posted on www.WorldAsbestosReport.org a new monograph titled "Killing the Future: Asbestos Use in Asia," written by Laurie Kazan-Allen and published by an international consortium of unions, victims’ groups, occupational health and safety organizations, and university groups under the overall coordination of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat. Published in July 2007, this monograph reviewed the experiences of China, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Korea, and Japan in dealing with the problems of asbestos contamination. It documents the West’s dumping of contaminated ocean-going vessels into the ship-breaking industries of India and Bangladesh, and addresses the impact of natural disasters on the scope of asbestos contamination. This work built on the work begun at the 2004 Global Asbestos Conference in Tokyo and at subsequent meetings in Asia. In January 2008, we posted a Japanese translation and are delighted to now make available a translation into Bangla (Bengali), the primary language of Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura. We hope to continue adding newly published materials to the www.WorldAsbestosReport.org web site as they become available. Our firm, through The Kazan, McClain, Abrams, Fernandez, Lyons, Greenwood, Oberman, Satterley & Bosl Foundation, Inc, is proud that our support of IBAS over the past 10 years has helped make it possible for it to publish works of this quality. As always, your comments are welcome.

A recent article published in The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals (and a fan of our website!), once again demonstrates that there is as yet no really good treatment for Mesothelioma. The article focused on an analysis of a multicentre randomized trial to determine whether adding chemotherapy to active symptom control in the treatment of patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma made any difference. It noted:

"Malignant pleural mesothelioma is almost always fatal, and few treatment options are available. Although active symptom control (ASC) has been recommended for the management of this disease, no consensus exists for the role of chemotherapy. We investigated whether the addition of chemotherapy to ASC improved survival and quality of life."  

Regrettably, the authors concluded:

"We observed no between-group differences in four predefined quality-of-life subscales (physical functioning, pain, dyspnoea, and global health status) at any of the assessments in the first 6 months."  

which means that "The addition of chemotherapy to ASC offers no significant benefits in terms of overall survival or quality of life."  

It still seems that the best hope for mesothelioma patients and their families is renewed efforts to understand how this disease evolves and find new treatment methods. This further highlights the overwhelming importance of eliminating future asbestos exposure in an effort to prevent future cases of this as-yet-incurable disease.  

Read the abstract on this trial of 409 patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma.

In October 2006, our firm was pleased to be a major sponsor of the International Mesothelioma Interest Group’s 8th Biennial Congress 2006 in Chicago. We are again pleased to sponsor this year’s IMIG Congress 2008 in Amsterdam, being held at the end of September. This Congress brings together the world’s leading experts in mesothelioma research from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Egypt, Finland, France, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, South Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with hundreds of attendees taking part in an extensive three-track educational program.

The program includes extensive sessions on the basic science of mesothelioma, developments on the imaging of tumors, the pathologic diagnosis of the disease, developments in the various methods of treating the disease, including chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and various forms of surgery, as well as developments in the epidemiology of mesothelioma and prevention. The program will also include presentation of scores of posters submitted by researchers from all over the world.

We remain committed to working with the medical profession in the hope that they will continue to better understand the way that mesothelioma develops and find effective methods of treatment and, we hope sometime soon, a cure. We hope to be able to bring you additional news about IMIG’s Congress 2008 as plans develop. In the meantime, please visit IMIG’s web site and drop in on our IMIG congress page.

We are delighted to announce that effective January 1, 2008, we have two new partners. Phil Harley has returned to the Firm after practicing elsewhere for the last five years, and will resume his position as one of the leaders of our case trial efforts. The Firm’s name has changed to reflect his return. Jim Oberman, who was an associate and then Counsel to the Firm since 1998, has also become a partner. Jim is a Certified Appellate Specialist and will head up our appellate and legal research and writing efforts. Reach their biographies by clicking on their names above. The addition of Phil and Jim to the partnership further enhances our ability to provide the very best possible representation for asbestos victims and their families, which continues to be our focus and our mission. Please contact us if we can be of any assistance or if you have any questions about these changes. Steven Kazan

I am very pleased to announce a new addition to the resources available on www.WorldAsbestosReport.org. We have just posted a new monograph titled "Killing the Future: Asbestos Use in Asia," written by Laurie Kazan-Allen and published by an international consortium of unions, victims’ groups, occupational health and safety organizations, and university groups under the overall coordination of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat. Published last month, this monograph reviews the experiences of China, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Korea, and Japan in dealing with the problems of asbestos contamination. It documents the West’s dumping of contaminated ocean-going vessels into the ship-breaking industries of India and Bangladesh, and addresses the impact of natural disasters on the scope of asbestos contamination.

This work builds on the work begun at the 2004 Global Asbestos Conference in Tokyo and subsequent meetings in Asia. Copies are being provided to key members of both the House and Senate leadership to help them better understand the magnitude of the asbestos problem in the hope that such knowledge will improve the chances for S.742, the current version of Senator Patty Murray’s oft-proposed and until now ignored bill to finally ban asbestos in the United States. We hope to continue adding newly published materials to the www.WorldAsbestosReport.org web site as they become available, and also to begin to accumulate and post relevant materials from past seminars and research projects in order to make that as comprehensive a resource as possible.

Our firm, through The Kazan, McClain, Abrams, Fernandez, Lyons, Greenwood, Oberman, Satterley & Bosl Foundation, Inc, is proud that our support of IBAS over the years has helped make it possible for them to publish works of this quality. As always, your comments are welcome.

To download a .pdf of the full report, click here.

I wrote before that one of our areas of interest is the international effort to ban the use of asbestos. It is ironic that much of the rest of the world is far ahead of the United States in this effort. My partners and I, through The Kazan, McClain, Abrams, Fernandez, Lyons, Greenwood, Oberman, Satterley & Bosl Foundation, Inc, have been major supporters of the organized global efforts to ban asbestos. Over the years, I think it fair to say that we have been the single largest financial supporter of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat, whose mission is stated in its very title. IBAS has helped organize and coordinate many meetings around the world devoted to asbestos awareness, education, and efforts to outlaw future use of asbestos. We came to realize that much of these materials produced at these international meetings was disappearing. Often, the meetings are small and not terribly well funded, and whatever informational materials they produced were not widely distributed beyond actual attendees. Nor were they generally available online.

I am very pleased to announce that we have found a way to solve that problem. We are sponsoring a new web site, now up and running, called www.WorldAsbestosReport.org. It is just that – a place we are making available for anyone hosting or organizing meetings related to asbestos use, asbestos disease, and efforts to solve the problems of such use, so that they can post calendar information about these meetings to a worldwide audience, and then post the actual program materials for all to see. We are inaugurating this web site with two landmark contributions.

IBAS and others organized the Global Asbestos Conference as an ongoing institution. The first conference was held in Brazil in 2000 and the second was held in Tokyo in 2004. The proceedings of both conferences were prepared and published on CD-ROM. These materials include not only the traditional forms of medical and scientific papers, but photographs, video clips, multimedia presentations, and a whole host of fascinating information. My firm contributed the funds needed to produce and distribute these annals on CD, and we have now posted them in their entirety on www.WorldAsbestosReport.org with most portions available in both .html and .pdf formats, and all fully searchable. Please drop by and visit it and let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

-Steven Kazan.

The Boston Herald published an article the other day about a local asbestos case involving a woman who died tragically of mesothelioma some years ago. The paper went on to quote some experts from around the country, and two of the comments struck me as particularly relevant. One person noted that mesothelioma is "a disease that has been ignored for decades." I found that a bit curious because at least at my office, mesothelioma has been our primary focus for over 30 years. It is true that much remains to be done, but it’s also true that the people who did the most to ignore asbestos disease and mesothelioma are the leaders of American industry who have known since the 1930s that asbestos was causing cancer, who were seeing cases of mesothelioma by the 1940s and 1950s, and who knew by 1960 without question that mesothelioma was a signal disease of asbestos exposure. The Herald went on to say that "in the past year, attorney competition for patients suffering from mesothelioma has heated up . . . ."

There is no doubt that lawyers are competing for new business, but this is not an asbestos phenomenon. Lawyers in all fields compete for new clients just as all businesses seek new customers. If you want to see enough lawyer ads to last a lifetime, just type mesothelioma into your favorite search engine and see what happens, or turn on cable TV late at night, or pick up any magazine devoted to veterans or other heavily exposed groups. But relying on these advertising efforts to select an attorney is a big mistake. There are reasonable ways to make such selection and appropriate questions to ask. There are lawyer web sites that read like the National Enquirer or other tabloids; there are lawyer web sites masquerading as non-profit informational public service resources; there are lawyer web sites that trace readers and make unsolicited "cold calls" to people who visit their sites, trying to sign them up as clients. I think that’s a shame, and I don’t do it.

I started our web site in 1998 because I lost a client to just such efforts. A gentleman who lived about 80 miles away from our office was given my name by his neighbor, whose case I had handled. Just as we were getting started, his daughter went online and found a lawyer on the East Coast who had a large web presence. That lawyer signed them up and then transferred the case to another lawyer in California, who seemed to lose interest after the gentleman passed away. Thereafter, the family came back to me, rather sheepishly, and asked if I would please take over the case. I did, but it taught me a great lesson. I learned that there were people out there who thought that a web site was more "real" than an office a short drive away with 100 people working very hard in 27,000 square feet of a real office building. I rapidly concluded that if there were people who thought that a web site was more real than an office building, I had better build a web site. So we did.

But I think what we do is too important and our clients’ problems are too serious to trivialize them, or publicize their personal business. So, we decided that our web site would serve primarily as an information resource for people, helping them to understand what asbestos is, what asbestos does, and what can be done to manage both medical and legal consequences. It seems like we got it right – The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, published a survey article about asbestos information resources and recognized our web site as one of the best out there. We have won other awards and recognition, but nothing is as satisfying as a family member contacting us to thank us for providing all the information they needed to understand what had happened to a loved one, even when they don’t ask for our assistance.

Steven Kazan.