Australian Woman Beats Mesothelioma

In a case that has amazed her doctors, Anita Steiner, of Melbourne, Australia, was cleared of mesothelioma, a rare and incurable cancer of the lungs, in January 2008. Having beat the odds once, she then fell pregnant for the first time in March at age 46.

“This is one miracle, meets a second, meets a third, really,” says her oncologist, Ian Haines.

“The pregnancy part of this is quite extraordinary, let alone it following chemotherapy for mesothelioma, which put her into remission.”

After a year of chest pain, Ms. Steiner was diagnosed last year with mesothelioma, a malignant lung cancer caused by asbestos that affects about 600 Australians a year.

After surgery to remove some of the cancer from her right lung, doctors estimated she had 12 months to live.  She was then put on a course of palliative chemotherapy to buy her some time.

“I always thought cancer was something that happened to someone else,” she says at her Brighton home. “I tried to stay positive and I tried to think that death was never going to happen to me.”

Doctors told Ms. Steiner she was clear of the cancer at the beginning of the year. But after celebrating the remarkable news, her health declined.

“I was trying to unpack boxes in our new house and I just kept throwing up,” she recalls. “I thought I might have come out of remission – it was an awful feeling – but then blood tests showed I was pregnant. My partner and I had been trying to get pregnant with IVF before I got sick and I was told I had a less than 1% chance of it working back then, so we had all but given up.”

At five months pregnant, Ms. Steiner is acutely aware of the risk that her cancer will return. While she refuses to focus on the “what ifs”, she has regular health checks.

“I don’t think it helps to dwell. Until I get the results of these tests, I feel stressed, but most of the time I just think about the future and having a child. I want to be with that child as he or she grows up.”

Ms. Steiner traced her asbestos exposure to age six, when her father pulled down a workshop in their Adelaide backyard. She is one of what experts are calling the “third wave” of asbestos disease cases in Australia.

While men who worked around asbestos have long represented the public face of such diseases, doctors are expecting more patients like Ms. Steiner: the children who played around home renovations or second-hand exposure.

The director of cancer services at the Austin Hospital, Paul Mitchell, says although Ms. Steiner’s case is unusual, he expects to see younger patients diagnosed with asbestos-related diseases. “Because there’s a latency period of 30 to 40 years from exposure to asbestos to the onset of cancer, we’re expecting the instances to keep increasing,” he says. “We’re…seeing people whose only exposure was in the home.”

There have been about 10,000 mesothelioma diagnoses in Australia since records began in the early 1980s. Experts predict that 25,000 Australians will die in the next 40 years.