Fireman's Fund Insurance Company a Division of Allianz has announced that it will increase its asbestos and environmental risks reserve by $301 Million. The company stated, "The move follows the completion of its regular independent external asbestos exposure review."

The occupational healthcare program embodied in the recently enacted legislation has the potential for being the most extensive, effective and innovated system ever enacted for delivering medical care to injured workers.

Almost 45 years following the historic 1964 NY Academy of Medicine conference in New York experts continue to memorialize the history of asbestos related disease. Now enters, defense expert John E. Craighead, who has written his viewpoint on the subject.
 

On the eve the NJ Senate's investigation into New Jersey's workers' compensation system, the question lingers on how to evaluate its health. New Jersey has always had a very large and very dedicated workforce A recent newspaper series by Star-Ledger reporters Dunstan McNichol and John P. Martin revealed that the system is serious flawed and that it is in need of a "complete overhaul."

Asbestos, a know cancer causing agent, has been found in toys still being sold in the US. The CSI Fingerprint Examination Kit and two brands of children's play clay along with many household products still in stores for sale have been reported by the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO).

1900 Asbestos recognized as a cause of occupational disease (asbestosis) in Charing Cross Hospital, London. A presumptive connection is established.
1918 Insurance companies, including Prudential, refuse to sell insurance to asbestos workers.

Asbestos-related disease was reported in industry more than 70 years ago. Dr. H. Montague Murray in 1906 at the Charing Cross Hospital in London testified before a governmental commission inquiry about occupational disability that he had seen a man in 1898 who was very short of breath and who had worked in an asbestos factory. The man's lungs at autopsy were badly scarred. It was Dr. Murray's prediction that since the hazards of this exposure were now known, very few similar cases would occur in the future, and there was no need to provide compensation benefits.

Studies linking asbestos to disease began in the early 1900's. Direct exposure to asbestos has been implicated in various diseases, principally mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis, and lung scarring. The risks in all four diseases are closely influenced by dose and duration of asbestos exposure, and they involve long and variable latent periods after initial exposure (20-40 years). 

A Haledon man is suing his World War II employer for damages in connection with the death of his wife, claiming that she died from asbestos particles from his job. In what Jon Gelman, a Wayne lawyer, said was the first action of its kind, James D. Parker filed suit yesterday in Superior Court in Paterson, seeking damages from the Union Asbestos and Rubber Co. for the estate of his wife, Angelina, who died of cancer last year at age 61.  

Unto the second generation, deadly asbestos fibers are now destroying the lungs of children of Paterson area asbestos workers of the 1940's, most of whom already have succumbed or are totally incapacitated from lung cancers and related diseases.