The frequently forgotten and often ignored asbestos victims in Libby, Mont., came out as possible big winners in the dead-of-night battle over health care reform.
According to the Associated Press, Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus quietly inserted language in a package of last-minute amendments that will grant the asbestos victims of the tiny town in the [...]
At last, the world’s oldest public health organization has joined the funeral dirge-paced parade to ban asbestos in the U.S.
The 50,000-member American Public Health Association adopted a resolution at its annual meeting this week calling on Congress to pass legislation banning the manufacture, sale, export, or import of asbestos-containing products including products in which asbestos [...]
California has a killer state rock.
After years of cajoling from the U.S. Senate and pleading from health activists, the Office of the Surgeon General finally warned the public of the dangers of asbestos.
Back in April, then-acting Surgeon General Steven Galson issued a statement about the deadly fiber and the illness it causes.
It wasn’t literature. Just 341 words explaining the most [...]
An Italian prosecutor has charged that two executives of the Swiss construction company Eternit were responsible for the deaths of about 2,000 factory workers and residents from the town of Casale Monferrato, which is near Turin.
Prosecutor Raffaele Guariniello told the Associated Press that the company, Eternit, spread asbestos fibers over wide areas by allowing [...]
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.
A couple of months ago he told me that medicine is a puzzle and a challenge, which can be both [...]
Just before Christmas 2007, an asbestos victims’ organization announced that testing it had commissioned had found potentially lethal asbestos fibers in the fingerprint powder of CBS broadcasting’s best-selling “CSI Crime Lab” toys.
Only now, 20 months later, after prodding from a judge presiding over a nationwide class action suit on the contaminated products, has CBS agreed [...]
A Cold Truth Special Report
SPOKANE, Wash. – It was a strange sight. Two people dressed head-to-toe in protective Tyvek and full-face respirators, carrying a stainless steel bowl and a dirt scoop as they weaved through tomato plants, ducked under heavy, cherry-laden branches and crawled around a collection of gigantic plastic yard toys.
Raymond Wu and Jennifer [...]
Charles Dickens was writing a tale of two cities. But his words – that “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times’’ – perfectly describe the tale of one this week.
After nearly a decade of fighting for and failing to get emergency help for the people poisoned by asbestos-contaminated vermiculite in [...]
People in Libby, Mont. are through licking their wounds and are working to put the acquittal earlier this month of W.R. Grace and its executives behind them.
But many say they live in fear that the innocent verdict offered up by the jury will give the former owner of the asbestos-contaminated vermiculite mine the chutzpa to [...]
