Doctors to talk about asbestos

As a pediatrician in a northwestern Montana town, Dr. Brad Black was “peripherally aware” of the large number of cases of asbestosis his medical office was seeing in 1977, but he could not have been expected to identify the town’s largest employer as the source of an emerging epidemic.

Then, in the early 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency came to Libby, Mont., to evaluate the situation. It put Black’s mind at ease that any health dangers at W.R. Grace & Co.’s vermiculite mine had been investigated and apparently dismissed.

“The fact they were doing a study gave us a false sense of security,” Black said. It wasn’t until later that “we realized the EPA knew about this and failed to act.”

This Saturday at the Ag Trade Center, Black and his colleague, Spokane lung specialist Dr. Alan Whitehouse, will discuss their work at the Center for Asbestos Related Disease, which opened in Libby in 2000, a year after the public health crisis was first chronicled by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Black and Whitehouse were invited by the Spokane Society of Internal Medicine to advise doctors about the illness.

“Spokane physicians are seeing patients from Libby, and they need to be thinking about diagnoses,” said Dr. John Osborn, a physician at the Spokane Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Osborn said he has treated a number of patients from Libby, some of whom have died of lung disease.

“Dr. Whitehouse has been providing a lot of the care for people in Libby, and eventually that responsibility will pass to other chest physicians,” Osborn said.

Black and Whitehouse will make their presentation at Update in Internal Medicine 2006, the 57th annual scientific meeting of the Spokane Society of Internal Medicine, which is co-sponsoring the event with the Spokane County Medical Society.

Whitehouse had been seeing sick Libby miners and their families in Spokane for nearly 25 years when Black called him in 1999.

“Once he had told me about the cases he had seen, I realized how they got exposed,” Black said.

It was the vermiculite ore, laden with tremolite asbestos. It was on the clothes the miners wore home from work. It also was in attic insulation and gardening products made from vermiculite, known by the brand name Zonolite. Black realized that the potential exposure to the community was huge.

In 2000 and 2001, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry screened more than 7,200 people in Libby for signs of asbestos-related problems. It was determined that 18 percent to 30 percent of them were potentially affected.

“We would see those people in follow-up at the CARD clinic,” Black said.

So far, 1,400 people have been diagnosed with asbestos-related problems. The clinic gets 20 new cases a month.