Asbestos HUB

UK Teen Fighting Mesothelioma Posted: 22 Mar 2009 07:53 AM PDT Asbestos cancer kills one person every five hours in Britain. Now a UK teen may be one of them. Sophie Ellis has been fighting asbestos cancer for four years. She was only 13 when she was diagnosed with mesothelioma - making her Britain’s youngest ever victim of this deadly disease. It is unknown how Sophie came to develop mesothelioma, a cancer linked exclusively to asbestos. Breathing in just one fibre can trigger mesothelioma. But because it normally develops 15 to 50 years after exposure to asbestos, it mainly strikes the middleaged and the elderly. Sophie’s case is therefore a little startling but consider how many public buildings and schools have been found to have asbestos lurking in the walls. Perhaps Sophie was exposed somewhere as a very young child. Or she could have passed by a building undergoing asbestos removal with an owner who cut corners and let the dust fly. Now 17 and about to start a second course of chemotherapy, Sophie says: “Nobody has a clue where I got it from.” “We can’t think of a time when I would have come into direct contact with asbestos. It took a while for the doctors to diagnose because they just didn’t expect me to have it at such a young age. “They said I was the first teenager in the UK to have developed it in the last 30 years.” Sophie developed a sore side from what she thought was a judo injury. Tests later found a tumor on the lining of her right lung. Eight months of chemotherapy followed before the lung was removed. The disease lay dormant for a while but cancerous cells still remain and Sophie must now have more treatment. Sophie still dreams of performing onstage in London’s West End. But with an average survival time after diagnosis of mesothelioma being between six and nine months, she does not know how much time she has to fulfill that dream.