You must be a shill for WR Grace! LOL
You're taking an off hand remark and trying to parse it as a legal/scientific statement, which it was never intended to be.
The mine at Libby, MT produced a substance that killed hundreds of people, not all of them due to occupational exposures.
Merely being near or around asbestos does not scientifically, in medicine or anywhere else, prove asbestos to be the causative factor in some ailment that someone obtains, just because such contact is a possible factor among many other possible factors.<]I>
That is about a worthless statement. Of course proximity does not equal exposure, and that goes for anything, not just asbestos...substitute lead, hexavalent chromium, radiation, etc for asbestos and the statement is still correct but worthless in this context.
The people at Libby, MT weren't just near, but were exposed to asbestos. And many died from cancer caused by asbestos exposure.
Having been an indoor air quality specialist in the past (certified in asbestos and microbial inspection and remediation) I have a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to litigation and hysteria that don't meet scientific and trade standards.
Grace executives may have escaped conviction for criminal charges (can you say "OJ Simpson"?)but the company still put out a multi billion dollar settlement. No one does that simply out of the goodness of their heart.
But you're way off base calling me a liar. Way off.
What I’m not is a shill for the trial lawyers association and their recognized industry of scamming the numbers of “victims” brought into their class action suits.
The state courts have found that MOST of the alleged victims the trial lawyers attempt to get added to the “class” are not and could not be proven victims. Are there real victims? Yes. MOST offered to the courts by the trial lawyers are alleged and NOT accepted, in the final analysis in the courts decisions; NOT found victims of WR-Grace.
While I am sure that WR-Grace and any other defendants can be held to blame for certain cases of mesothelioma, the first thing to understand is that corporations sometimes make a financial decision to pay a claim, rather than continuing to pay lawyers to defend against it, and the second thing is that the science of mesothelioma shows that more than simple exposure to asbestos is at work - because some individuals have long term continuous “exposure” and never develop mesothelioma and others have a brief exposure and do obtain mesothelioma. Obviously, additional factors are at work in addition to “asbestos exposure” and some individuals have more of any additional factors and others do not.
Again, this is not an attempt to qualify anything about any specific case, at Libby, Montana or anywhere else.
But, your general statement that WR-Grace is to be blame for most victims of mesothelioma is disputed by the state courts which keep coming to the conclusion that most victims presented to them are victims of the trial lawyers.