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New Drug Offers Hope For Asbestos Sufferers
U.K. -- Doctors have discovered a new drug to combat the suffering of asbestos disease victims, it emerged yesterday.
Researchers have hailed Alimta as a huge breakthrough in treating mesothelioma, an incurable lung cancer caused by inhaling tiny shards of asbestos.
Details of the drug, which is being tested at the Newcastle Freeman Hospital, were uncovered in a Frontline Scotland documentary, Don't Hold Your Breathe, which will be broadcast on BBC1 Scotland tonight.
Twenty-seven Newcastle-based mesothelioma sufferers were treated with Alimta, which is currently unlicensed in Britain and the United States, where it was developed.
The majority of the patients, most of whom are former construction workers, showed rapid improvements in their symptoms.
Speaking on the programme, Professor Hilary Calvert, who has led the trials, said the results had been unusually good.
She said: "We've had about half the patients having a shrinkage of their tumour and most of the patients have got a marked improvement in their symptoms. These are the best results I've seen in my career."
But Professor Calvert, who hopes the drug will be licensed by 2002 if further tests are successful, added that although the results were encouraging, it was not yet clear if the symptoms would go away forever.
News of the drug came as a support group for Clydeside sufferers of the disease launched a campaign to streamline Scots law so more employers who subjected their workers to asbestos could be prosecuted.
One of those campaigning is Owen Lilly, 63, from Clydebank, whose condition was triggered by his job in shipbuilding.
Doctors believe he has just weeks to live and will not see the compensation to which most believe he is entitled.
He said of himself: "What you have got here is a talking skeleton. That's all you have got and I am bitter about it."
The Clydeside Action on Asbestos group, who will present a petition to the Scottish parliament today, claims too many companies are able to stall legal proceedings and avoid compensation payouts.
The group will urge the Scottish executive to establish a fast-track compensation system and ensure that juries, rather than judges, decide the levels of compensation.
Mesothelioma, together with other asbestos-related diseases, have claimed the lives of more than 120,000 in the UK.
In Clydebank, where many residents worked in construction industries that used large amounts of asbestos with little protection, the mortality rate from mesothelioma is 11 times higher than the UK average.
John Woodcock SCOTSMAN 2000 Nov 7;6
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