Dr. David Weill calls asbestosis “a pretty serious thing, possibly fatal.” It’s why he’s intensely frustrated that thousands of false asbestosis claims are promoted by unscrupulous class-action plaintiffs lawyers before credulous judges and juries.

“The real cases get unfair settlements in these mass settlements,” said Weill, who is director of the Lung and Heart-Lung Transplant Program at the Stanford University Medical Center.

“They get diluted out by the false claims. I think that's a big deal. Some really injured people deserve much more than the $1,000 or $1,500 people end up getting” while literally thousands of other claimants are paid despite being healthy, he told The Examiner.

Weill, who has testified twice in recent years before Senate committees as an expert witness on asbestosis, knows the subject intimately. He helped blow the whistle on a massive Texas legal scam where lawyers and doctors were manufacturing thousands of false claims of another lung disease, silicosis. Defendant companies found that many of the supposed silicosis victims had also filed suit earlier claiming to suffer from asbestosis.

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Weill explained to the Senate that the two diagnoses are utterly distinct and easy to differentiate on X-rays, and that “it would be extremely unusual for one person in a working lifetime to have sufficient exposure to both types of dust to cause both diseases.”

Furthermore, he said, “outside the litigation setting, confusion between silicosis and asbestosis does not occur.”

Yet the attempted fraud was so blatant that he “encountered one case where a different screening firm diagnosed a plaintiff in February and then again in March. The former screening generated an asbestos ‘diagnosis,’ while the latter generated a silicosis ‘diagnosis.’ Silicosis was not mentioned in the first report, and asbestosis wasn’t mentioned in the second one. A treating physician, of course, would have noted all potential abnormalities on the first report.”

In these lawsuits, though, the physicians reading the thousands of X-rays usually had no contact with the patients.

Later, Weill was hired by the W.R. Grace Company to help design a “blind” clinical study (the actual diagnosticians weren’t told their medical readings were being used in litigation or who sponsored the study) of the asbestos claims against Grace.

Weill said the study found that more than 80 percent of the asbestosis claims were demonstrably false.

The difference between actual and fake victims, he told The Examiner, “is a difference between no breathing impairment and potentially having a fatal disease.” It was just that stark.

“That kind of discrepancy shouldn't happen,” he added.