mesothelioma attorney

Mesothelioma and Asbestosis Attorney and Lawyer Assistance

Attorney and Lawyer assistance is crucial for receiving just compensation. An asbestos settlement lawyer maryland or other qualified attorney could increase your settlement by ten times or more. The below gives a primer on mesothelioma and asbestosis to allow you to more accurately interview your Parkersburg mesothelioma lawyer or attorney or any other qualified asbestos settlement attorney.

Working with asbestos is the major risk factor for mesothelioma. A history of asbestos exposure at work is reported in about 70 percent to 80 percent of all cases. Asbestos has been widely used in many industrial products, including cement, brake linings, roof shingles, flooring products, textiles, and insulation. In addition to mesothelioma, exposure to asbestos increases the risk of lung cancer and asbestosis, a non-cancerous, chronic lung malady.

Smoking does not appear to increase the risk of mesothelioma. However, the combination of smoking and asbestos exposure significantly increases the risk of developing cancer of the air passageways in the lung.

OSHA has set the acceptable levels of asbestos exposure in the workplace. People who work with asbestos wear personal protective equipment to lower their risk of exposure. To reduce the chance of exposing family members to asbestos fibers, asbestos workers are usually required to shower and change their clothing before leaving the workplace. To find out if your workplace is complying with regulations, your best source would be a lawyer for mesothelioma in Houston or any asbestos law firm Texas.

Shortness of breath and pain in the chest due to an accumulation of fluid in the pleura are often symptoms of pleural mesothelioma. These symptoms may not appear until 30 to 50 years after exposure to asbestos. It is important to see a doctor about any of these symptoms. Only a doctor can make a diagnosis.

Diagnosing mesothelioma is often difficult, because the symptoms are similar to those of a number of other conditions. It begins with a review of the patient’s medical history, including any history of asbestos exposure. A complete physical examination may be performed, including x-rays, a CT or CAT scan, or an MRI. A biopsy is needed to confirm a diagnosis of mesothelioma.

If the diagnosis is mesothelioma, the stage, or extent, of the disease needs to be determined by the doctor. Staging involves more tests in a careful attempt to find out whether the cancer has spread and, if so, to which parts of the body. This helps the doctor and victim plan treatment.

Standard treatment options include:
-Surgery to remove part of the lining of the chest or abdomen and some of the tissue around it.
-Radiation therapy using high-energy rays to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors.
-Chemotherapy using of anticancer drugs to kill cancer cells throughout the body. Most drugs used to treat mesothelioma are given by injection into a vein. Pemetrexed resulted in tumors that shrank in 41 percent of patients when used in combination with a more commonly used chemotherapy agent called cisplatin. Only 17 percent of patients receiving cisplatin alone experienced tumor shrinkage. Additionally, those on the pemetrexed combination lived nearly three months longer than those on cisplatin alone.

Sometimes, these treatments are combined. Adding chemotherapy to other treatments being giving to patients with mesothelioma, a lung cancer usually linked to asbestos exposure, does not appear to improve either survival or quality of life.

One bright side is that the asbestos exposure control plan has drastically reduced incidence of asbestosis and mesothelioma over the years.

Another bright light is that of attorney assistance. Do not hesitate to call an attorney immediately if you are diagnosed with asbestosis or mesothelioma. The preponderance of expertise is in metropolitan areas. Here is a list of most frequently searched terms to show that:
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mesothelioma litigation

Battalions of asbestos attorneys, paralegals, investigators, doctors, academics, claims managers, claims adjusters and the like count on asbestos litigation for all or a substantial portion of their income. The way in which the litigation has unfolded in the past couple of decades has created certain distortions in the way the “system”, if it can be called that, works. These distortions do not, generally, play out in favor of mesothelioma victims, who are the most severely injured of those unfortunate enough to have been exposed to asbestos. Remember, those individuals who have uncontested diagnoses of mesothelioma have highly meritorious cases: in addition to the severity of the disease process, the fact is that the only known cause of the disease is asbestos exposure (smoking, for example, has nothing whatsoever to do with it) and the level of exposure required is quite low, especially comparison to the level of exposure required for a disease like asbestosis.

In the vast majority of the early, pioneering cases in the asbestos litigation, however, the plaintiffs were claiming non-malignant diseases (as is the case today). The two categories were scarring of the internal tissue of the lung (asbestosis) and scarring of the lining of the chest cavity (pleural scarring, also referred to as pleural thickening, pleural plaques or pleural encasement, depending on the manifestation of the scarring). The plaintiffs in these early cases were asbestos insulation workers (also commonly called “pipecoverers” or “insulators”) who worked at construction sites such as power stations, chemical plants and refineries, and workers who performed the same sorts of tasks in shipyards (commonly called “laggers”). It soon developed that steam fitters and other trades also had very high rates of disease, and those unions were accordingly screened as well, resulting in further influxes of claims into various state and federal court systems throughout the country. This brings us up As the litigation has progressed through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the trend of what are called “mass settlements” has emerged. This is only logical, as claims that are grouped by the thousand have to be handled en masse — there is no other way. This type of settlement comes into being when an attorney or law firm representing a large number of asbestos plaintiffs reaches at least a tacit agreement with an asbestos company on what certain types of cases are worth, and what that company’s share of that payment should be. A system falls into place where, for each claimant, the attorney submits medical records and evidence of exposure to that company’s product, and the company evaluates this submission and writes a check, generally based on the type and severity of the disease the plaintiff has. This is generally done on a “matrix,” where, for example, the company will pay x dollars for a mesothelioma, y dollars for a lung cancer, z dollars for asbestosis, and so forth. These types of settlements started to take place relatively early in the litigation with boiler manufacturers and gasket/packing manufacturers whose share of the total liability in many cases was considered (not always correctly) to be much lower than that of the thermal insulation manufacturers.to the early 1980s.