Tuesday, December 04, 2007Connie Schultz
Plain Dealer Columnist
It happens in large families all the time: Parents organize kids by age and ability and divvy up the chores.
Kati Maloney was the second-oldest daughter of eight, and her job was the laundry. Week after week, she gathered and sorted the clothes in the family's basement on Cleveland's West Side.
Her father's work clothes took extra effort. She'd grab one shirt at a time, turn her head and shake. With every snap, dust particles from asbestos filled the air.
Week after week, Kati breathed in the dust.
Four decades later, Kati couldn't breathe anymore.
Kathleen Maloney LoPresti died at 55 from mesothelioma, the same asbestos-related disease that killed her father and her uncle. Unlike her dad, she never worked directly with the deadly "magic mineral."
But she took good enough care of him for it to kill her anyway.
The question looms: How many more Kati's are there?
"We know the secondary victims of asbestos are out there," said Dr. Pasi Janne, a thoracic oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and one of Kati's doctors. "We don't know how many there are, and we don't know yet if they're mostly women."
It may be getting easier to connect the dots from what we do know.
So far, mostly white, male laborers get mesothelioma, Janne said. They were the guys who got the better-paying, often union, jobs that exposed them to asbestos, which also increased their chances of lung cancer.
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