By Isaac Gorodetski

Last month the Pennsylvania Supreme Court raised the bar for proving causation in asbestos cases. Previously, plaintiff attorneys could argue that any exposure to a product that contained asbestos was sufficient to establish substantial causation for asbestos-related diseases.

The defendants in Betz v. Pneumo Abex LLC et al., 2012 Pa. LEXIS 1208, filed a motion challenging this so-called "any exposure" theory. "Any exposure" causation is problematic because it seems to fly in the face of the general scientific consensus that asbestos-related diseases are "dose responsive" - meaning there is a relationship between the amount of a person's exposure to asbestos and the amount of the disease that person is likely to have.

If asbestos-related diseases are dose-responsive, then this would suggest that small levels of asbestos exposure may not cause asbestos-related diseases. The plaintiff's expert in Betz tried to claim both that asbestos-related diseases were dose responsive and that "any exposure" to asbestos was enough to establish substantial causation. The court rejected this argument:

In this regard, Dr. Maddox's any-exposure opinion is in irreconcilable conflict with itself. Simply put, one cannot simultaneously maintain that a single fiber among millions is substantially causative, while also conceding that a disease is dose responsive.

Given this recent ruling, it will be interesting to see how asbestos cases that rely on dubious causation arguments fare in the state of Pennsylvania.