Asbestos Use Collapsed Decades Ago. Mesothelioma Deaths Did Not.

By almost any measure, the United States stopped using asbestos. Consumption of raw asbestos fiber peaked at a record 803,000 tons in 1973, then fell off a cliff. It has been 500 tons or less every year since 2018, and in 2024 the country used an estimated 110 tons, all drawn from existing stockpiles rather than new imports. The last domestic producer shut down in 2002.

A drop that steep might be expected to pull the death toll down with it. It did not, at least not on the timeline the fall in use would suggest.

Two Curves That Refuse to Match

Federal mortality data tell the other half of the story. From 1999 to 2015, the United States recorded 45,221 mesothelioma deaths, and rather than declining, the annual number rose, from 2,479 in 1999 to 2,597 in 2015, an increase of about 5%.

The mismatch was not what forecasters expected. Earlier projections had the annual death count peaking around 2001 to 2005 and easing afterward. The real data ran the other way and kept rising, which is why public-health researchers describe the trend as running contrary to what the decline in asbestos use had predicted.

Why Falling Use Does Not Mean Falling Deaths

The answer is time. Mesothelioma does not follow exposure by months or a few years. The latency period, the stretch between first breathing asbestos fibers and a diagnosis, commonly runs 20 to 40 years and in some cases as long as 71. A worker exposed on the job in 1975, near the peak of US asbestos use, can reach a diagnosis in the 2010s or later.

That delay means the deaths recorded now are a readout of exposures from the middle of the last century, not from today. The collapse in consumption after 1973 will show up in the death data eventually, but shifted decades downstream.

There is a hopeful signal underneath the flat count. Adjusted for the aging of the population, the death rate has been easing: the age-adjusted mesothelioma death rate fell from 13.96 per million in 1999 to 10.93 per million in 2015. Per person, the risk is slowly receding. The absolute count stayed high because the country’s population grew and aged at the same time, and because the exposed generation is now reaching the ages when the disease appears.

The Exposure That Has Not Fully Ended

The trend also carries a warning the raw tonnage hides. Mesothelioma deaths have continued to appear in people under 55, a group too young to fit the classic mid-century exposure story. Researchers read that as a sign of ongoing exposure, which today happens mostly during the maintenance, renovation, and demolition of older buildings that still contain asbestos.

The new-case rate is falling, and federal data credit that to fewer people being exposed as old products left the market. But the same data, read alongside the death curve, explain why a material the country largely abandoned 50 years ago is still writing itself into the mortality tables now, and why the regulatory fights over the remaining legacy asbestos in old buildings still matter.