Dr. Michael Harbut has diagnosed and treated thousands of workers suffering from disease caused by exposure to asbestos in Detroit’s automobile plants and to the taconite miners on the Iron Range of northern Michigan and Minnesota.

High Resolution Computed Tomography

A couple of months ago he told me that medicine is a puzzle and a challenge, which can be both astonishing and demanding, but it is finding the answers.

It appears that he and his colleague, Dr. Carmen Endress, have found the elusive answer to what causes the unrelenting pain that accompanies most asbestos-caused diseases.

Harbut, co-director of the Karmanos Cancer Institute’s National Center for Vermiculite and Asbestos-Related Cancers, credits the discovery to a new imaging approach developed by Endress, an associate professor of radiology, Wayne State University School of Medicine.

They were able to show that there was a documented erosion on the interior wall of the ribs caused by pleural plaques – a fibrous scarring which is the most common manifestation of asbestos exposure.

“This action of the pleural plaque against the covering of the bone and the bone itself is . . . an anatomically logical explanation of the unrelenting pain which some patients experience,” said Harbut, chief of the institute’s Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

The ability to detect and track the progression of the disease earlier will allow physicians to develop treatment plans which will require far less of the heavy pain-killers patients often use for years.

In the study, Harbut was able to show the progression of the disease in a 55-year-old woman who was exposed as a child to the asbestos-like taconite dust on her father’s work clothes.

Harbut says he has treated far too many taconite miners with asbestos-like disease. For years he has fought to get federal regulatory agencies to realize the health danger from this mineral, which actually is a residual product from the region’s iron mines.

The efforts by Harbut and other occupational medicine specialists to get the government to act has been repeatedly blocked by lobbyists from the huge steel companies that own the mines and industries that want to use the taconite tailings to cover roads.

The work by the two physicians clearly documents the link between taconite and the asbestos-like diseases.

Harbut again urged the regulators to reevaluate the definition of asbestos. He says this is especially important within the context of legislative efforts to prohibit the use of asbestos, which is moving through Congress at a glacial pace.

Here is a link to the findings, which were featured in the current edition of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health.