BATON ROUGE -- A woman who claimed in a lawsuit that FEMA trailers exposed their residents to formaldehyde has died of lung cancer.

Desiree Collins, 47, who had asked the federal court in Baton Rouge to approve her suit as a class action -- not against the Federal Emergency Management Agency but against companies that sold trailers to FEMA -- died July 2.

She had spent several weeks at Baton Rouge General Medical Center with respiratory problems. Her lung cancer was diagnosed a week before she died, attorney Justin Woods of New Orleans said Thursday.

Woods said he hasn't determined whether formaldehyde is to blame the cancer, and forensics specialists will test tissue taken while Collins was alive.

However, lung cancer is typically diagnosed after years, even decades, of growth -- a major reason it is so deadly.

"Because symptoms often do not appear until the disease has progressed, early detection is difficult," the American Cancer Society says on its Web site. About 60 percent of patients diagnosed with the most common form die within a year after diagnosis, it says.

Collins, whose family lived at Renaissance Village near Baker, sued Forest River Inc. of Elkhart, Ind., and other unnamed travel trailer vendors.

Her husband, Earl, and her children now will act as plaintiffs in the case, Woods said. He said that if tests indicate the lung cancer is connected to formaldehyde exposure, the lawsuit will be changed to include a wrongful death claim.

At issue are 120,000 trailers FEMA supplied to people displaced by hurricanes in 2005.

The lawsuit alleges Collins and thousands of other hurricane victims in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama who lived in the trailers "have been exposed to dangerously high concentrations of formaldehyde fumes and have had no choice but to accept their plight."

Formaldehyde is used in a number of materials inside the trailers, including particle board, plywood, glue, curtains, molded plastic and countertops. It can irritate eyes, nose, throat and skin, according the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

As of May, FEMA had received 140 formaldehyde complaints.

A spokeswoman for River Forest lawyer Jason Bone of New Orleans said he was not available for comment.

In documents filed earlier this week in Baton Rouge federal court, Bone writes that the company's trailers met FEMA guidelines and complied with state and federal law. "In all material respects, River Forest provided safe and reasonably efficient housing."

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)