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  • Home > Blog > Featured Story > UH’s Carbone Finds Another Mineral that Causes Malignant Mesothelioma, North Dakotans Put on Notice of Potential Health Hazard
Posted on Wednesday, Jul 27, 2011

UH’s Carbone Finds Another Mineral that Causes Malignant Mesothelioma, North Dakotans Put on Notice of Potential Health Hazard

By Nancy Meredith
Michele Carbone, MD, PhD, one of the world’s premiere authorities on mesothelioma and director of the University of Hawaii Cancer Center, has once again concluded a groundbreaking study that could have far-reaching implications of the environmental risks on the health of some Americans.  Carbone and his research team have concluded that exposure to high levels of the mineral erionite, used in road gravel in several US states, can lead to the development of mesothelioma.  He added that “there is reason for concern for increased risk [of mesothelioma] in North Dakota in the future.”

Airborne Erionite Becomes Lodged in Lungs – Similar to Asbestos
According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, North Dakota and 11 western states have erionite-containing rock deposits.  The researchers focused on Dunn, ND where rocks containing erionite have been used to produce gravel for the past 30 years.  They found that the hazards of exposure to the mineral have increased recently with expanded oil exploration and increased traffic on the over 300 miles of road covered with erionite-based gravel.  The urbanization of the area has led to erionite dust becoming airborne where it is then inhaled and lodges in people’s lungs.

Up until this study, the only known cause of mesothelioma was through exposure to asbestos.  Asbestos is a known carcinogen and has been linked to mesothelioma and lung cancer, as well as to asbestosis and other respiratory diseases.   Mesothelioma has a 30 to 60 year latency period, and most often diagnoses are not made until symptoms appear and the disease has progressed to an advanced stage leaving the patient with life-threatening complications.

Turkish Villages Used for Comparison
Carbone began his study years ago in Cappadocia, a region of Central Anatolia in Turkey, where an epidemic of malignant mesothelioma had been reported.  His team found then that mesothelioma was associated to exposure to erionite, that has some of the same physical properties as asbestos.  However, the researchers found that erionite is significantly more potent than asbestos.  They found that “erionite was 500–800 times more tumorigenic than chrysotile asbestos and 200 times more tumorigenic than crocidolite asbestos.”

To determine the potential health implications to Americans, Carbone and the researchers compared erionite from the Turkish villages to that from Dunn, North Dakota.  The erionite concentrations found in the air measured in North Dakota “along roadsides, indoors, and inside vehicles, including school buses, equaled or exceeded concentrations in Boyali, [Turkey] where 6.25% of all deaths are caused by malignant mesothelioma.”

With their findings, the researchers concluded that erionite exposure for North Dakota school bus drivers and children, road workers, and others regularly using the erionite roads, may exceed the often used benchmark for risk management actions of an estimated risk probability of one additional cancer per 10,000 people. 

If the latency period for erionite plays out the same as for asbestos exposure, the number of cases of malignant mesothelioma could soon be on the rise.  In addition, adults as young as their 30’s could contract mesothelioma from exposure in their childhood on the school buses and the local playgrounds.

The researchers recommend “novel preventive and early detection programs in ND and other erionite-rich areas of the United States.”  Hopefully, some of the medical research that is still in the lab will prove useful for early detection of mesothelioma in the upcoming years to offer these Americans an effective treatment and cure for the disease if contracted from erionite exposure.

The study was supported in part by the National Cancer Institute, the American Association for Cancer Research Landon Innovator Award, and by grants from the Butitta Mesothelioma Foundation, and the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation.