The March 2010 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives presents a recent study conducted by Lap Ah Tse and other researchers at the School of Public Health and Primary Care from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The research compared the incidence of mesothelioma cases among Hong Kong residents to the consumption of asbestos in the country to determine whether a correlation existed between the years 1960 and 2006.
Mesothelioma is a primarily linked with exposure to asbestos. The difficulty is tracing when and where the exposure took place because the typical latency period between exposure and developing malignancy is 42 years with a standard deviation of 10.5 years. The researchers took this lag time into account in their study.
The highest usage and/or consumption of asbestos in Hong Kong was between 1960 and 1963. The study found that Age Standardized Incident Rates (ASIRs) for males began to increase significantly in 1994 and peaked in 2004 consistently, suggesting definite correlations between consumption and incidents of mesothelioma. The incidents among women rose in the 1980s and peaked in the 1990s, earlier than their male counterparts. The study further found no obvious trends in recent years compared to the men.
The researchers predict that the mesothelioma incidence rate for males will peak in 2009, with the total number of cases peaking in 2014 and will then slowly decline over time. However, the incident rate may not decrease back to the “risk unrelated to asbestos exposure” for decades because of use of chrysotile asbestos fiber continues in Hong Kong and is not as highly regulated as in other countries. In addition, thousands of products containing asbestos exist and any time they become disturbed, damaged or deteriorated, they create an environmental risk.