“Any Exposure” Asbestos Theory Rejected By Illinois Federal Court
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois will exclude the opinions of two proffered experts who were going to testify to the “Any Exposure” theory of asbestos exposure in a personal injury case. That theory posits that any exposure to asbestos fibers at all constitutes an underlying cause of injury to the individual exposed. In excluding the testimony, the court emphasized that “the notion that it is theoretically possible that any amount of exposure could cause injury is different from an opinion that the particular level of dosage experienced by a plaintiff was sufficient to cause his or her particular injury.” In this case, the plaintiff failed to offer any expert testimony about how much asbestos he experienced and whether that dosage was sufficient to cause his lung cancer. The proffered experts even admitted in their depositions that they did not consider any information with respect to this particular plaintiff’s actual exposure.
