Leroy Thom remembers the first time he thought those in charge of the W.R. Grace mine in Libby where he worked might be hiding something from employees.

While he can’t recall the exact year, he said the moment higher-ups decided miners couldn’t smoke while working or on their breaks spelled trouble for the hundreds who, as it would later be discovered, were mining vermiculite containing poisonous asbestos dust.

“They always called it a nuisance dust and said it was just annoying, like the dust that might fly up from baling hay, but that it was nothing we should worry about,” Thom said. “So one had to think, if there isn’t an issue with the dust, which is what management claimed, then why are you enacting a smoking ban?”

Thom, who is vice president of the board of directors at the Center for Asbestos Related Disease (CARD), is now one of thousands who have been diagnosed with what he calls Libby’s disease.

It’s one that is the byproduct of decades of mining operations in Libby where employees, and later their families, breathed in rare toxic amphibole asbestos fibers that lodged into the lungs of many who were exposed. There is currently no cure.

When Thom was first diagnosed with asbestosis, he was told he had pleural plaquing, or scarring, toward the bottom of one of his lungs. However, more recent screenings show scarring, which restricts one’s breathing and gradually spreads, is now present in both of his lungs.

Thom is one of the CARD clinic’s 7,000 patients, a figure officials at the clinic say is steadily growing every year and has been since the clinic began 19 years ago.

AS PATIENT loads continue to increase at the clinic, Thom and many others say there is a significant need now more than ever for more research on the disease, many aspects of which remain a mystery to those in the medical field.

“There have been people who have expressed interest in researching Libby amphibole, but we haven’t managed to lock down much funding to go ahead with it,” Thom said “We need resources to be able to find how why it affects people differently and is there some way to stop the progression? That’s the biggest question, is can we find a cure?”

That’s the million dollar question.

Other questions are why can the disease lie relatively dormant for years and all of a sudden manifest itself so quickly with some patients, why do some people who were exposed to the toxin for years not develop the disease while others with minimal exposure do, and why does the disease have, in some cases, a latency period of up to 50 years?

OVER THE years, more than $600 million in federal, state, county and law settlement money has been thrown into cleanup efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency, but very little has gone toward researching asbestos-related illnesses.

The clinic has worked on creating a database over the years to track patients’ screenings.

Mike Giesey, president of CARD’s Board of Directors, said research is going to be a major focus moving forward as the Libby community continues to handle the asbestos crisis.

The search for additional research and funding goes hand in hand with CARD’s push to educate pulmonologists on how to properly identify and diagnose the disease that remains elusive to many in the medical arena.

“We will certainly need more funding if we want to do research here in Libby; these undertakings can be expensive. But we also hope that maybe through conferences and other events we can convince people in medical communities elsewhere that it’s a rare disease worth studying,” Giesey said.

At an Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization seminar in 2018, Dr. Brad Black explained the severity of Libby’s situation and the intricacies of the disease. Black, who now heads the CARD clinic and has been a doctor in Libby since 1977, told the crowd about one woman who moved to a home about 13 miles outside Libby the year the mine shut down. After finding herself at CARD in the early 2000’s, x-rays revealed pleurisy on both her lungs.

“For the last two years she hasn’t been able to take a decent breath. She hasn’t been able to sleep a full night,” Black said. “She’s lost a lot of lung function.”

He went on to describe in words and x-rays the fiber that has claimed the lives of hundreds. He described what to look for when checking for fibrosis, pleural thickening, plaquing and more, subtle findings that, to an untrained eye, might be missed.

It’s a presentation he has told a version of for quite some time to various crowds. It’s one he also ended on a note of positivity, and a vow, to “never quit in our efforts to bring awareness to the ongoing, long-term risk from asbestos.”

Reporter Kianna Gardner may be reached at 758-4407 or kgardner@dailyinterlake.com.