US Asbestos Bill Debut Delayed by Silica Issue
By Susan Cornwell
WA****NGTON (Reuters) Jan 26 - The chief sponsor of a measure to
compensate asbestos victims said on Tuesday its introduction had been
delayed for a week while senators discuss how to handle claims of
injury by another mineral, silica.
Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, chairman of the U.S. Senate
Judiciary Committee, told re****ters the panel would hold a hearing Feb.
2 to try to establish medical criteria for silica claims.
Specter had planned to introduce this week his proposal to take
asbestos claims out of the courts and compensate them from a $140
billion privately funded trust instead.
But he said the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Vermont's
Sen. Patrick Leahy, asked him to delay the introduction while they
worked on some of the language.
"We've got a problem on mixed dust," Specter said. "The issue is, if
you have a trust fund to pay all people from asbestos, and then some of
the cases are allegedly being repackaged as silica cases, it's not
solving the problem."
They should work out medical criteria for injuries caused by each
mineral so as not to compensate people twice, he said.
In recent years an explosion of asbestos injury claims have clogged
U=2ES. courts and bankrupted dozens of companies. Manufacturers have
urged senators to write the trust fund law so lawyers could not
repackage asbestos claims into claims involving other airborne fibers
like silica.
But Sen. Leahy said on Tuesday he was concerned that some "last-minute"
provisions in the bill would impair the legal rights of victims of
other airborne minerals in the workplace.
"My two grandfathers worked as stonecutters in the granite quarries of
Vermont and both suffered from silicosis because of their workplace
exposures to stone dust," Leahy said in a statement. "One of my
grandfathers died at the age of 35 because of that exposure.
"Asbestos legislation should focus on compensating asbestos victims and
not denying the legal rights of victims of other airborne dust, fiber
or other minerals," Leahy said.
Reuters Health Information 2005. =A9 2005 Reuters Ltd.
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