Incidents of mesothelioma are still on the rise throughout Canada, and diagnoses continue to climb higher each year. While the dangers of asbestos have been recognized and at least somewhat mitigated in the modern workplace, many victims of yesteryear’s employers find themselves rudely awakened to a grim prognosis on the brink of retirement.

Dirk Jansema, a retired pulp mill employee and mesothelioma victim of 61, found his health unexpectedly deteriorating in the face of consistent physical activity and an engaged, balanced lifestyle.

“You get ripped off of your life,” Dirk says, “it wasn’t self-inflicted – somebody else did this to me.”

Jansema is certainly not alone. In the United States and Canada thousands of individuals each year are diagnosed with a terminal asbestos related illness such as mesothelioma. And while workplace conditions are slowly improving, those who are already in the clutches of an asbestos disease often have nowhere to turn.

Faced with dramatically diminishing time, a family in shock, a sudden pile-up of medical bills and frighteningly little available information, asbestos victims like Jansema often don’t know where to turn. Many asbestos manufacturers and distributors offer settlements for injured individuals, but they pay as little as $5,000 and come at the cost of precluding personal injury lawsuits. Personal injury lawyers, on the other hand, could secure far better compensation for handling mounting medical bills and providing for a family unexpectedly left behind, or they could fold in the face of an incredibly well funded defense. And in the midst of sorting through options and ensuring their families are taken care of, victims still have to come to terms with their own imposing mortality.

Asbestos related illnesses often get swept under the rug simply because the number of deaths seems negligible. According to a recent report published by the Rideau Institute in Ottawa, however, that’s hardly the case.

“Among B.C. workers alone, it is estimated that 1,500 workers will die from asbestos-caused disease over the next five years,” says the 2008 report. “And it is known that many cases of asbestos-caused disease are not recognized as such and not captured in the figures.”

A University of British Columbia study shows that between 1992 and 2004 only about one quarter of the victims of asbestosis, a lung disease caused by asbestos, actually filed worker’s compensation claims. Often times, this is due to workers being unable to determine the origin of exposure which caused the disease – a necessary fact in order to obtain proper compensation.

“There are cases,” says Larry Stoffman of the Health Canada committee on asbestos, “where people have only been exposed for one day and they ended up with mesothelioma 30 years later.”

Meanwhile asbestos regulations in the United States and abroad continue to tighten, and the EPA is even discussing the possibility of a total ban. For those like Jansema who are suffering from the mistakes of last generation, however, that comes as little consolation.