Causation and Epidemiology
Scientific Proof
Latency is the time from exposure to clinical manifestation. Minimum latency periods are established for many exposure-disease pairs, and disease appearing sooner than the minimum cannot be attributed to that exposure.
Mesothelioma latency typically exceeds twenty years.
Alternative Names:
Latency, Induction Period
Why it Matters?
Minimum latency is an objective defense that requires no expert disagreement about dose, since a disease appearing five years after an alleged exposure cannot have been caused by it where the recognized minimum is twenty. That argument works cleanly where the exposure period is documented. It also constrains which employers and products can be implicated, since exposures within the latency window before diagnosis are excluded.
Frequently Confused with
Frequently asked questions
How does latency defeat causation?
Does it limit which defendants are implicated?
