Each year hundreds of thousands of cancer deaths in the United States are attributed to exposure to the increasing quantities and types of hazardous chemicals present in the environment, including the workplace.¹ For a variety of reasons, victims of cancer caused by these substances face great obstacles in recovering damages from manufacturers, distributors, and users of the various products. Probably, the most important is that little is known about the biochemical processes that lead to the formation of cancer. Thus, a major hurdle in ensuing litigation is proving to a legal certainty that plaintiff's injury was caused by defendant. However, these difficulties are not always insurmountable, and many plaintiffs have been able to receive compensation under workers' compensation statutes or through tort actions, including negligence and strict products liability claims.

The insidious nature of cancer creates another barrier to plaintiffs exposed to carcinogens. Since the latency period for most cancers is from 10 to 35 years, a plaintiff may not become aware of the disease until long after the statute has run, thus recovery for injuries may be barred by statutes of limitation. Recognizing the problem peculiar to latent diseases, many courts have liberally interpreted ambiguous statutes of limitation or avoided them altogether to arrive at a "fair" result. In a recent products liability case, Locke v. Johns-Manville Corp.,² the Supreme Court of Virginia liberally construed a two-year personal injury statute of limitation to permit a plaintiff to recover damages despite the fact that the last exposure to defendants' asbestos products occurred six years prior to the filing of the law suit. Similarly, in Clutter v. Johns-Manville Sales Corp.,³ the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, in three asbestosis and mesothelioma claims, interpreted an Ohio statute of limitation liberally to allow the parties to proceed to the merits.