is asbestos still being used today or did they actually ban it

Frank, the Oriskany exposure is actually well documented in litigation records. Ships built before 1980 used somewhere between 300 and 600 different asbestos-containing products in a single vessel, and the manufacturers knew exactly where their materials were going.

To your point about the 1991 reversal, that was Corrosion Proof Fittings v. EPA, and it gutted most of the 1989 ban. Courts ruled the EPA hadn't met its cost-benefit burden under TSCA. So legally, the industry won that round. The TSCA reform in 2016 gave EPA new authority but asbestos still hasn't been fully banned under it, which... yeah.

For the Camp Lejeune and USS Iwo Jima exposure specifically, there may be multiple overlapping claims worth looking at, VA benefits, the Camp Lejeune Justice Act of 2022, and a separate civil suit against product manufacturers. Those don't cancel each other out and the timelines and procedures are different for each. Please talk to an attorney about your specific situation before filing anything because the order you pursue them can matter.

The 1991 reversal you mentioned, that was Corrosion Proof Fittings v. EPA, Fifth Circuit struck down most of the EPA's 1989 ban. Twenty-plus years of litigation later and I still see cases where that decision is the reason someone's exposure was technically "legal." Doesn't mean there's no liability though.

What a lot of people don't realize is that the military cases often run on two tracks simultaneously. You can pursue VA benefits AND a civil lawsuit against manufacturers. They're not mutually exclusive. Camp Lejeune specifically also has the Camp Lejeune Justice Act of 2022 now, which opened a separate window for claims that had previously been blocked by North Carolina's statute of repose.

The documentation piece you mentioned at the end of your post is genuinely the most important practical thing anyone in this thread can do right now. Service records, ship assignments, work orders, even old union books. I had a client once who found a 1979 timesheet in a shoebox that placed him in a specific boiler room on a specific date. That document changed everything.

Jurisdiction matters a lot in these cases too, so please do talk to an attorney about your specific situation.

Patricia, digging through those Johns-Manville records is smart. That company's internal documents from the 1950s and 60s are some of the most damning evidence in the history of occupational medicine. The Selikoff studies (Irving Selikoff published his landmark findings on insulation workers in 1964 in JAMA) essentially confirmed what the industry already knew privately. What a lot of people don't realize is that the latency period for mesothelioma runs 20 to 50 years, so someone exposed in 1978 like the original poster might not see a diagnosis until the 2000s or 2010s. That gap is part of why the legal and medical trail gets complicated. Your records from that era matter enormously, both for your care team trying to piece together exposure history and for any legal process. I'd bring everything you find to your oncologist at your next visit too, because exposure duration and intensity can sometimes influence treatment decisions.

You're right on all of it, and I want to be clear that your anger is completely justified from a medical and policy standpoint.

The 1989 EPA ban was overturned by the Fifth Circuit Court in 1991, and what we were left with is a patchwork of restrictions that still allows certain asbestos-containing products into commerce. I had a patient in 2019 who had worked with imported chlor-alkali diaphragms not knowing they contained chrysotile asbestos, which is technically still permitted under current rules. Perfectly legal exposure, decades after we knew exactly what it causes.

The latency period (the time between exposure and diagnosis) for mesothelioma is typically 20 to 50 years, which is why we're still seeing diagnoses from 1970s and 1980s military service right now. The NIOSH data on shipyard workers has been consistent on this for a long time. Camp Lejeune and the Navy fleet specifically show up repeatedly in occupational exposure research because of how heavily asbestos was used in pipe insulation and ship construction through that era.

For your VA claim, the specificity you already have, the ship name, the dates, the description of where the asbestos was, that's genuinely useful. A lot of claims fall apart on documentation so what you've described here is worth putting in writing formally.

Talk to your oncologist about how your exposure history might affect treatment decisions too, because it sometimes matters.