Malignant mesothelioma in Sub-Saharan Africa: A case report from Lubumbashi, DR Congo

Although asbestos has been used throughout Africa in the past decades, no reports of asbestos-related malignant mesothelioma are available from sub-Saharan Africa, except from South Africa and Zimbabwe. We present a case of a 39-year-old man who died from a histologically proven malignant mesothelioma of the peritoneum in Lubumbashi, DR Congo. No occupational exposure to asbestos could be found in his history. In view of his young age, we speculated that he had been exposed to asbestos as a child, which was highly plausible because he had grown up in one of the numerous mining estates of the region. The houses of these estates were often built with asbestos-containing materials, notably roofs made of corrugated asbestos-cement. The possibility of past domestic or environmental exposure to asbestos was substantiated by the identification of chrysotile and crocidolite fibres in samples of asbestos-cement collected from the home where the patient had lived as a child. To our knowledge, this is the first report of malignant mesothelioma from a country in the Central African region. We expect that heightened awareness and improved diagnosis will lead to the detection of more asbestos-related diseases in Africa.