Scapa Dryer Fabrics Inc. v. Knight

Scapa Dryer Fabrics, Inc. is a textile manufacturer, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it produced dryer felts at a manufacturing facility in Waycross. Some of the pipes and boilers in that facility were insulated with material containing asbestos, and Scapa used yarn containing asbestos in some of its manufacturing processes. Between 1967 and 1973, Roy Knight worked on multiple occasions at the Waycross facility as an independent contractor. Almost forty years later, Knight was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a cancer most commonly associated with the inhalation or ingestion of asbestos fibers. After his mesothelioma was diagnosed, Knight and his wife sued Scapa, claiming that Scapa negligently exposed him to asbestos at the Waycross facility and caused his mesothelioma.1 The case was tried by a Ware County jury, which returned a verdict against Scapa and awarded more than $4 million in damages to the Knights.2 The trial court entered a judgment upon that verdict, and Scapa appealed.

Among other things, Scapa argued on appeal that the trial court erred when it admitted the expert testimony of Dr. Jerrold Abraham, a pathologist. In his testimony, Dr. Abraham opined that, if Knight actually was exposed to asbestos while working at the Waycross facility, that exposure was a cause of his mesothelioma, regardless of the precise extent of the exposure. Dr. Abraham explained that a small number of respirable asbestos fibers are naturally present in the air, but exposure to this background asbestos is not known to cause mesothelioma. When someone is exposed to respirable asbestos in excess of the background, however, his cumulative exposure may build to a point that it exceeds the capacity of the lungs to absorb the exposure, and at that point, the cumulative exposure may lead to mesothelioma. According to Dr. Abraham, the precise point at which cumulative exposure is sufficient to cause any particular person to develop mesothelioma is not scientifically knowable, and for that reason, when a person actually has mesothelioma, it can only be attributed to his cumulative exposure as a whole. Because each and every exposure to respirable asbestos in excess of the background contributes to the cumulative exposure, Dr. Abraham reasoned, each exposure in excess of the background is a contributing cause of the resulting mesothelioma, regardless of the extent of each exposure.