The number of Iron Rangers known to have died from a rare form of lung cancer has risen to 82, up from the 63 reported last year by state health officials.
Health officials say they found the additional cases of mesothelioma by checking death records in other states for former Iron Range residents who moved out of Minnesota, the Duluth News Tribune reported Tuesday. The numbers came Monday from a University of Minnesota team leading the long-term Taconite Workers Health Study.
Dr. Jeffrey Mandel, with the university’s School of Public Health and the lead researcher on the study, said a “back-of-the-envelope” analysis shows the mesothelioma rate is considerably higher than it should be. “But we are still doing the analysis to find out how much so,” Mandel said in a telephone news conference. It also remains unclear where the victims were exposed to asbestos.
Mesothelioma is a rare but almost always fatal lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos fibers. The disease often takes 30 years or more after exposure to show up.
Earlier reports on the elevated numbers on the Iron Range suggested the asbestos exposure came from workers who dealt with commercial asbestos, such as insulation on pipes, furnaces and boilers. But others have speculated that asbestos-like fibers within taconite rock released during processing may be causing the mesothelioma — speculation that spurred the $4.9 million health study approved by state lawmakers in 2008.
“We’ve basically concluded our data collection phase,” said John Finnegan, dean of the university’s School of Public Health. “It’s an enormous number of people we have data on now … people who worked in mining back to the 1920s.”
Early results also show that 1,681 taconite workers, of about 46,000 born since 1920 who worked in the industry, developed some sort of lung cancer.
The study has five parts, and results from each one will be made public after they are completed, and a final, overall report is expected after that.
“We’re on target” to have results within five years, Mandel said.
