Risk Factors

I was exposed to asbestos, what now?

While there's no magic formula to determine your exact risk, if you know or suspect you've been exposed to asbestos, you should let your doctor know. He or she can then be vigilant about performing appropriate tests and observing any symptoms that may be indicative of the beginning stages of an asbestos cancer.

The use of asbestos has fortunately become more and more limited, as restrictions on it have increased over the last few decades (asbestos is still not banned in the US). However, the latency period in asbestos cancers is long, sometimes decades, so workers who dealt extensively with any of the over 5,000 products that contained asbestos--including floor tile, paints, automotive brake shoes, roofing materials, and more--may still be at risk for one or more asbestos-related cancers.

While the continuous, regular exposure of these workers certainly seems to increase the risk of developing an asbestos cancer, no known level of exposure is safe. So it's not just these workers who are at risk of getting an asbestos cancer. Worker's family members, who washed the asbestos-laced clothing or hugged an asbestos-dust-covered dad just home from work, are also at risk.

Then there are those who never thought they were working around asbestos: the do-it-yourselfer whose home improvements unknowingly brought them into contact with asbestos-containing products or the studen who attended summer school 30 years ago in that old building they were renovating at the time.