Very few products are still made using asbestos, but asbestos is not banned in America and products containing less than 1% asbestos can actually still be sold. More importantly, due to the enormously widespread use of asbestos last century, people who work in certain occupations are still at risk of exposure today.

These include construction and demolition workers, people who work in industrial plants built with asbestos construction products, and custodial and maintenance workers employed in older buildings. Shipyard workers, including stevedores, may sometimes be at risk if they work on an older vessel that was constructed in the decades when asbestos was used.

Asbestos Exposure

Stevedores, also known as longshoremen, are workers who load an unload cargo from ships. Any ship built during the years of peak asbestos use might potentially contain asbestos, meaning that any ship worker, including stevedores, are at risk of exposure.

This risk is present for stevedores even though they may not work in areas of a ship where asbestos is most commonly found. While asbestos was most often used in electrical, thermal, and acoustical insulation in ships, a stevedore on a working ship may have been exposed simply because many ship-board activities in place where asbestos was present may have generated asbestos dust that could be inhaled by any worker on board.

Stevedores were also at risk simply because they may have been occupied in loading and unloading bags or containers of asbestos-containing materials. In these cases the amounts of asbestos dust generated could potentially have been enormous, resulting in asbestos exposure for anyone working in the area, as well as for the stevedores themselves.

While the greatest risk for stevedores is for people who worked on ships during the twentieth century, the risk does still exist for people currently doing this type of work, because older ships may still contain asbestos.

However, the stevedores themselves aren't the only people at risk. Secondary asbestos exposure is also a possibility. This type of exposure occurs when workers exposed to asbestos transport fibers to their homes. Many people working around asbestos weren't given protective clothing to wear, so their clothes and even hair and skin often became covered in asbestos dust if they were working around the substance. Those fibers would be transported home, where they could be inhaled by spouses and children.

Stevedores Asbestos Uses

Stevedores themselves rarely worked on areas of ships where asbestos exposure was a direct risk, but clouds of asbestos dust could be generated that might be inhaled by anyone working on board.

For stevedores, the greatest risk of exposure was when their work involved loading and unloading cargo containing asbestos. Open bags and containers of asbestos-containing products could be encountered, and breakage of any such containers would mean sure exposure. In addition, before the dangers of asbestos were widely known, there were no regulations concerning the safe containment of asbestos as there are today, meaning that poorly sealed containers and bags could potentially leak small amounts of dust and fibers into the air.

On the ships themselves, asbestos was most commonly used as insulation in areas of the ship subjected to high heat. The most common ship-board locations for asbestos include as lagging around boilers and furnaces, insulation covering pipes, on seals and gaskets, and as electrical insulation on wiring.

What Stevedores Should Know

Two of the most well-known asbestos-related diseases are asbestosis and mesothelioma, both of which develop only as a result of exposure to asbestos. Other asbestos-related diseases include lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and esophageal cancer. These types of cancer aren't always caused by asbestos exposure, but can develop if exposure occurs.

Asbestosis is a chronic lung condition that occurs in people who are exposed to high levels of airborne asbestos fibers over long periods of time. Asbestos fibers, when inhaled, can lodge deep in delicate lung tissue. Over time the fibers cause chronic inflammation and irritation, eventually leading to the development of scar tissue. This scar tissue isn't able to properly absorb oxygen. The result is that people with asbestosis experience considerable pain when breathing and have reduced lung function.

Mesothelioma is a very different type of disease, although it too develops in the lungs. Mesothelioma cancer can develop in the lining of the lungs, heart, abdomen, or testicles, although the most common form is pleural mesothelioma, which develops in the lungs. Medical experts don't understand exactly how asbestos fibers cause mesothelioma, but it is believed that mesothelioma can develop as a result of very small amounts of asbestos exposure. New treatment options may yet prove to be more effective than what is currently available, but for the most part, the only effective way of preventing a death from mesothelioma is to prevent asbestos exposure.