Risky Occupations

At the Locks Law Firm, our mesothelioma attorneys help those who have suffered as a result of asbestos exposure. In this clip, you can learn more about the occupations that pose the highest risk of asbestos exposure.

MR. MARC B. WEINGARTEN: You’ve asked me to talk a little bit about the different types of occupations and the different people that are at risk to get asbestos disease and the best way to do it, I think, was originally done by a very famous medical researcher, Dr. Irving Selikoff, who’s no longer with us anymore, but he was probably the most prominent researcher of asbestos disease that ever lived and he divided the asbestos disease categories into three waves of people at risk. The first wave was what he called the miners, the millers, the manufacturers of asbestos products. The three M’s and they were the very earliest cases. The second wave was those people who used the asbestos products and that can be virtually any trade or occupation, from railroad workers to Naval personnel to insulators to construction workers to refinery workers. Virtually every trade could use asbestos and, therefore, could get asbestos disease and then after that, Dr. Selikoff found what he called the third wave of asbestos people at risk and those were people in buildings where there was asbestos and it could be teachers, it could be shop owners, it could be virtually anyone and you don’t have to be in an occupation working with asbestos to get asbestos disease. You can have non-occupational exposure just by being in a household where someone who does work in an asbestos industry brings home the work clothes or brings home the asbestos dust on his or her hair or body or person. So the real bottom line to remember is that unfortunately, I guess, asbestos doesn’t respect sex. It doesn’t respect geography. It doesn’t respect occupation. It doesn’t respect age. Everyone who works around or works near or is near or around asbestos dust is, unfortunately, at risk to get some type of an asbestos disease and if that happens to you, you need an experienced lawyer. That’s the bottom line.