Second-Hand Cancer

OSWEGO, NEW YORK

Twenty years ago, when Charlie Haws took down ceilings and dismantled boilers at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego, employers required men exposed to asbestos to change clothes at work before going home. Wives shook out the men's work clothes, inhaling white dust as they put them into the washing machine. Now, one of those wives, Deborah Haws, has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a fatal cancer that has been directly linked to asbestos and whose symptoms appear decades later.

Since 1990, 32 cases of the disease have been diagnosed in people who reside with workers exposed to asbestos. Deborah suffers from abdominal pain, nausea and anemia.

Husband Charlie, a member of Oswego Local 611 of the Civil Service Employees Association/AFSCME Local 1000, was once an equipment operator at SUNY's power plant and exposed to airborne asbestos fibers there. He now works as a university grounds worker, and has enlisted his union's help to request that SUNY expand the annual asbestos-screening program of exposed workers, required by law, to include the families of those 12 men.

"Insurance won't pay for asbestos screening for families so the employer ought to," says Deborah Haws.