THE DEATH of a former hairdresser could not be definitively linked to occupational exposure to asbestos, the Dublin City Coroners Court heard yesterday.
Ann Roe, a 56-year-old mother-of-three of Mangerton Road, Drimnagh, Dublin 12, died in Our Ladys Hospice, Harold’s Cross, on April 13th, 2009.
Pathologist Anthony Dorman said that a postmortem on Ms Roe had uncovered evidence of tiny fragments of “probable” asbestos bodies in the lungs. Dr Dorman said that, while hairdressers’ exposure to asbestos was “low or rare”, that it was documented.
He noted that there was some evidence from the UK which suggested that, over the 20-year period between 1980 and 2000, seven cases of hairdressers with mesothelioma had come to light.
Mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer sometimes referred to “asbestos lung cancer”, has a latency period of between 10 to 40 years, and is usually associated with people who worked on construction sites exposed to asbestos.
Dr Finbarr OConnell, a consultant respiratory physician at St James’s Hospital who treated Ms Roe from 2005, told the court he had consulted three UK databases, none of which recorded any case of hairdressers presenting with mesothelioma.
He did note that a number of hairdryers used in the 1960s and 70s were later proscribed due to the use of asbestos in their heat shielding, but said that it would be near impossible to establish whether the hairdressers in which Ms Roe worked contained hairdryers which were later recalled.
Dr O’Connell said that strong evidence did not exist to suggest hairdressers have been significantly exposed to asbestos and noted that, in those cases in which it had been documented, it was unclear if the asbestos exposure might have occurred elsewhere.
He noted that some Dublin buildings would have ceilings which are made out of asbestos even today. “We are all probably much closer to asbestos every day than we think we are and yet it is a very rare disease,” he said.
Dublin city coroner Dr Brian Farrell said this was a “very difficult” case. He determined that Ms Roe’s death had been caused by a bilateral pulmonary thromboembolism complicating a pleural sarcomatoid mesothelioma. “The evidence does not clearly establish occupational exposure though this cannot be completely excluded.”