Mesothelioma Help Cancer News
Residents of the Town of Asbestos in Canada Consider New Name
With the internet, social media, and many other modern forms of communication, everyone’s “brand” and naming has taken on increased importance. It is not unusual for a company to rebrand itself with a different feature that they want people to associate with their business. In this case, there is a town’s name associated with disease and death.
The news from Asbestos, Canada a year ago was that the town leaders wanted to change the name because of the negative connotations that the word asbestos holds. Asbestos, Canada is the home to the Jeffrey Mine and is a small town 80 miles east of Montreal. The approximate population is around 7,000 people.
For many years the Jeffrey Mine, which was named after W.H. Jeffrey, who bankrolled the town’s asbestos mine, was the leading producer of asbestos in the world. The mine made Canada one of the world’s leaders in asbestos exportation. It was last owned by the Johns Manville Corporation.
A vote was scheduled to be taken by the townspeople in October on what to change the name to. The four choices that were to be voted on were:
- Apalone – an indigenous species of turtles.
- Jeffrey – W.H. Jeffrey bankrolled the town’s Jeffrey Asbestos Mine.
- Phoenix – the mythological bird of rebirth.
- Trois-Lacs – a local lake and the name of a municipality that merged with Asbestos in 1999.
This week the leaders of Asbestos, Canada decided to “pause” the re-naming as there is a lot of dissension among the town people on the changing of the name.
Asbestos causes cancer. This was declared by the World Health Organization over 30 years ago. It is a fact no amount of rebranding can hide. Asbestos continues to kill people.
Approximately 100,000 people die globally each year from asbestos related diseases. Asbestos can cause lung cancer, malignant mesothelioma, and asbestosis. It is estimated that at least 80-85 percent of cases of malignant mesothelioma can be traced to exposure to asbestos. Changing the name of the town will not change the history of what asbestos has and continues to do to the health of the world.
Asbestos, Canada will always be associated with the Jeffrey Mine and asbestos manufacturing. The legacy of the damage that asbestos has done to peoples’ lives and contributed to their premature deaths cannot be rebranded.
We wish the people of Asbestos the best as they search for a new name and a healthy future that does not highlight their history in asbestos production.
Insights for Families of Mesothelioma Patients Coping with Loss
Malignant mesothelioma is an aggressive cancer. For some, the journey is long and for others it can strike quickly and cruelly. It is imperative to remember that the person with the disease is someone who usually has a rich life filled with family, friends, and relationships before the diagnosis. While malignant mesothelioma is a rare disease, unfortunately the distress it causes can be life altering for those left to deal with the aftermath. The person diagnosed with malignant mesothelioma can be anyone: a spouse, mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, child, or friend. These people can never be replaced. Their loss affects us all.
Recently, two brave registered nurses lost their battles to malignant pleural mesothelioma. One R.N. was a 76 year old woman who had been diagnosed with malignant mesothelioma several months after retiring. She was an accomplished R.N. turned nurse practitioner who had spent her career working with children’s development. The other R.N. was a 59-year old mother of three who had been working full time in the radiation oncology department. Both of these women combated the disease courageously and were more concerned with caring for their families’ emotional wellbeing than they were with their own health and outcome.
Over the years we have seen survivors that are living long, full lives and we rejoice at their good fortune and pray that it continues. The goal of the mesothelioma program has always been to encourage a good quality of life with long term survival leading to a cure. We continue to learn that these journeys and losses are clinical but often personal.
The loss of these two women was particularly difficult due to the fact they were hardworking, caring, and empathetic individuals. Despite an age difference of over two decades, these women shared several similarities. Both had loving families, had been registered nurses for 35 and 50 years respectively, and had seen death in their work and personally experienced the pain of losing loved ones.
This year 2020 has been in no way ordinary. The COVID-19 virus has enabled all of us to see things with a different perspective. We’ve redefined what’s important – our relationships and how we treat each other have become paramount.
As we mourn the loss of these two malignant pleural mesothelioma victims, we remain grateful that we had the opportunity to know them. We offer prayers to their families. They will not be forgotten.
How Clinical Trials Play a Role in Finding Cures and Treatments for Mesothelioma
Science is advanced through research, and the research process begins with clinical trials. Many us of have grown more familiar with the clinical trial process with the search for a vaccine for COVID-19. As the search continues for a cure for malignant mesothelioma, it is imperative that people involved in the mesothelioma community continue to be aware of what scientists are researching at this point for potential cures and quality life-extending treatments.
Chemotherapy has been the standard of care for patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma since it was approved by the FDA in 2004. Scientists continue to discover what the best methods to administer chemotherapy for malignant mesothelioma are. The usual route of administration is intravenously every three weeks for a 6 cycle treatment. In general, chemotherapy can be absorbed by mouth, intravenously, intramuscularly, subcutaneously, intraperitoneally directly into the abdomen, intravesicular directly into the bladder, intrapleurally into the pleural space, through implantable devices, topically, and intra-arterially. Intra-arterial chemotherapy is given directly into the artery that is supplying the blood to the tumor. It is done through angiography a special x-ray using dye to see the blood vessels.
NCT02611037 is a clinical trial that is currently being offered at the Lee Moffitt Center in Tampa, Florida. This is a unique trial that offers chemotherapy through a different approach by administering the chemotherapy intra-arterially, directly into the artery that is supplying the blood to the tumor. The chemotherapy is administered by angiography using a special x-ray dye to see the blood vessels.
One of the main challenges of treating malignant pleural mesothelioma is the location of the disease within the human body. The purpose of this study is to deliver transarterial chemoperfusion treatment with cisplatin, methotrexate, and gemcitabine in a safe and effective manner. This procedure is performed by an interventional radiologist, who injects one third of the drug into the internal mammary artery which supplies the blood supply to the pleura. The other two thirds of the drug are then injected into the descending aorta. This area of the body also has blood vessels that supply blood to the pleura. The procedure usually takes one hour and is followed by a one hour post-recovery period before patients are discharged.
In this study, patients undergo angiogram and transarterial chemo administration treatment every 4 weeks (3-6 weeks interval allowed) with cisplatin, methotrexate, and gemcitabine. The medications are administered into the thoracic aorta and/or the internal mammary artery.
Initial findings are promising. This treatment is safe and effective and may improve quality of life for patients who may not have many other options. For more information on the NCT02611037 trial, please go to www.clinicaltrials.gov or talk to your mesothelioma team.
Asbestos Isn’t Banned in America – Yet
It is easy to understand why so many people falsely assume that asbestos is banned in the United States. There are decades of research that prove that toxic fibrous asbestos crystals can cause mesothelioma and lung cancer in even the smallest quantities. While many of asbestos’ applications are now limited, there are unfortunately still loopholes in current legislation.
In 1989, there was a partial ban on manufacturing, importing, processing, and distributing products that contained asbestos, as well as a ban to prevent asbestos from being utilized for new purposes. The asbestos industry fought back, and so gaps in the law prevail.
Consumer products such as baby powder, children’s makeup, and crayons continue to be flagged as having the carcinogen. Manufacturers of these products are not required to warn consumers if asbestos accounts for less than one percent of ingredients, even though it is known that even small amounts can cause cancer. They should be required to do so.
America is the only developed country to have not yet imposed a complete ban on asbestos.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, while the last American manufacturer of asbestos ceased operations in 2002, the United States imported 681 tons of asbestos in 2018 with Russia as its sole source. Beyond this, the USGS 2020 Mineral Commodity Summary of asbestos noted that some asbestos minerals are also imported as part of manufactured products, “including brake blocks for use in the oil industry, rubber sheets for gaskets used to create a chemical containment seal in the production of titanium dioxide, certain other types of preformed gaskets, and some vehicle friction products.”
Organizations like the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation (CureMeso) and the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) are currently leading the battle to finally ban asbestos in the United States. Linda Reinstein founded the ADAO in 2004 in response to her husband’s diagnosis of mesothelioma, and continues to this day to raise public awareness about the dangers of exposure and to work towards a global asbestos ban.
The Alan Reinstein Ban Asbestos Now Act of 2019 is currently in committee with both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and is ready for a vote of the full house. The bill, if enacted, “prohibits the manufacturing, processing, and distribution of asbestos or any mixture or article containing asbestos.” ADAO has been lobbying for the bill to come up for a vote in both chambers of congress.
If you would like to support efforts to get the bill passed to ban asbestos in America, you can sign ADAO’s petition on Change.org or make a donation to them or CureMeso today.
New Dual-Immunotherapy Regimen Proves Effective for Mesothelioma Patients in Phase 3 Clinical Trial
Dr. Paul Baas of the Netherlands Cancer Institute and the University of Leiden in Amsterdam recently presented on the CheckMate 743 study at the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer World Conference. The randomized phase III Checkmate 743 clinical trial prescribed mesothelioma patients who were not candidates for surgery with a combination of first-line nivolumab and ipilimumab.
The promising results yielded a four-month improvement in median overall survival for patients who received the new dual-immunotherapy regimen as compared with those who had received platinum-based chemotherapy, the current double-chemotherapy standard of care for mesothelioma.
“This is the first positive randomized trial of dual immunotherapy in first-line treatment of patients with unresectable MPM,” Dr. Bass noted. “And therefore nivolumab plus ipilimumab should be considered as a new standard of care.”
The patients featured in the phase III trial were randomly assigned treatment plans consisting of either a maximum of two years of nivolumab and ipilimumab, or six cycles of pemetrexed alongside cisplatin or carboplatin.
Results revealed that the treatment plan consisting of nivolumab and ipilimumab yielded comparable efficacy outcomes to chemotherapy for progression-free survival and objective response rate, but was significantly more successful than chemotherapy when it came to the duration of response (DOR). The DOR for the dual-immunotherapy treatment reached 11.0 months whereas the DOR for chemotherapy reached only 6.7 months.
“In the ipi/nivo survival curve, going out to 36 months, we see a plateau at about 30%,… suggesting, as we’ve seen with other trials of immunotherapy, there is a degree of durability that is way beyond what we’ve seen previously with chemotherapy. And this, indeed, may have been driven by maintenance nivolumab,” explained Dr. Dean Fennell of the Cancer Research UK Centre Leicester, University of Leicester and University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust.
Our medical experts can help you make sense of your treatment options and how to move forward. Reach out today.
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