Women And Mesothelioma

Among the people who are stricken by mesothelioma, the ratio of men to women is three-to-one. In fact, when the words "mesothelioma victim" are uttered, the image that arises is that of a 60-something white male who worked with asbestos in some form years ago perhaps in the Navy, or in the construction or shipbuilding industries.
Women Exposed by Loved Ones
Although it's true that most of the thousands of people diagnosed with mesothelioma every year are men, public health officials have begun to recognize another population victimized by asbestos exposure: the women whose husbands, fathers or brothers brought the asbestos dust home with them every day. It's becoming apparent that many women have already died from cancer that is only now suspected to have been mesothelioma.
Missed Diagnoses?
Mesothelioma is not easy to diagnose, and many physicians do not know how to identify the disease. Over the past few decades, both men and women have died from unidentified respiratory and other cancers that may well have been mesothelioma. The cases of mesothelioma among women in particular may have been missed, in part because they usually didn't have jobs that exposed them directly to asbestos.
However, plenty of people who were children in the 1940s and 1950s have memories of their mothers regularly washing their husbands' work clothes separately because of the clouds of sparkly asbestos dust that would be shaken from the clothes. Some of those mothers died years ago (or not so long ago) from an undiagnosed cancer. Was it mesothelioma?
Little Is Currently Known
The U.S. government only started tracking mesothelioma cases in 1999 and the number and type of cases due to secondhand asbestos exposure is still largely unknown.
As thoracic oncologist Dr. Pasi Janne of Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute stated recently, "We know the secondary victims of asbestos are out there...we don't know how many there are, and we don't know yet if they're mostly women."