For years, we’ve all been exposed to asbestos-laden health hazards thriving in old houses, garden hoses, car brakes, and other such places.
Although its roots stretch back to the ancient Roman era, asbestos mining was not industrialized until the late 19th century.
It appealed to manufacturers and builders because of its desirable physical qualities: sound absorption; average tensile strength; fire, heat, and electricity resistance; and affordability.
Asbestos was also widely used in electrical and structural insulation. Until people became aware of the health hazards asbestos presented, it became commonplace to use asbestos throughout the 20th century, and in most countries.
Asbestos consists of six naturally occurring silicate minerals, each composed of long, fibrous crystals.
Each discernible fiber comprises millions of small “fibrils” that are released into the air through abrasion and other degrading agents. They are also known, by color, as blue asbestos, brown asbestos, white asbestos, and green asbestos. Lung cancer, mesothelioma, and asbestosis are caused by prolonged exposure to asbestos fibers.
Because the substance plays such an active role in life, the slow-onset symptoms still emerge decades after asbestos was outlawed.
Asbestos litigation is, therefore, the longest and most expensive mass tort in US history. For manufacturers and insurance companies, asbestos liability remains a hot topic. Despite having asbestos in your home, it is not usually a major issue. Simply living in a house or constructing an institution isn’t dangerous.
Asbestos is dangerous when asbestos is broken down over time. Broken asbestos may spill asbestos dust into the atmosphere, which can become dangerous.
So if you have good asbestos remaining, just leave it be. Shaking it might throw the fibers up in the air, posing a new health risk. Do your homework before making home modifications to asbestos products.
Where Asbestos Poses Health Risks In The House
Roofs and shingles can consist of asbestos cement. The most damaging development ever since has been the unnecessarily ambitious efforts to throw up records of death from asbestos exposure. In 2004, David McCumber, co-author of An Air That Kills, reported on extensive work conducted on asbestos in the W R Grace mine at Libby, Montana, at the University of Seattle.
McCumber and his colleague were researching a series of articles about US mining when they heard of the woes developing in the town’s vermiculite mine.
Although the vermiculite ore pulled from the mine was spread openly across town, laid for the track at the high school, and even distributed among residents for their home construction and other purposes, the health hazards of the included asbestos were kept secret from the public.
The miners were not only taking asbestos dust home with them every day, children were jumping directly into heaps of ore in parks and on streets and breathing in toxic quantities of asbestos dust.
One of the most unsettling aspects of asbestos mining and widespread use throughout the country is that our own EPA kept the first inkling of its deadly toxicity crammed in drawers for decades.
With the influence exerted by W R Grace and other asbestos companies, years of work went into attempting to discredit the dangers of this ever-fashionable building material.
Even the physicians who initially identified the Libby miners’ lung ailments held smoking to account for diseases contracted by men who had never touched a cigarette before.
The advantages trumped awareness of the health risks asbestos was posing, and for decades vermiculite continued to be used on a scale by builders, landscapers, and others well into the 21st century.
In Ohio alone, by 1975, the Scott’s Turf Company was extracting up to a quarter of the Libby mine output, infecting an entire other company with asbestos dust and disease. Hundreds of Scot’s employees started with bleeding lungs and other respiratory symptoms.
Although the EPA identified the cause of this pandemic, their findings quickly slipped into the dustbin of a filing cabinet until decades later when some of their staff members opened the first report’s door. One doctor in Libby was starting to try to get asbestos out of the health hazards that it was imposing on the town’s miners in the 1980s.
He was the only one who attempted to bring it to light, but the mine owner and other doctors conspired to drive him out of town. This is the fault of the Grace Commission, which worked for decades to keep the government off the backs of the entire asbestos sector.
All this time and effort put into masking the scourge of asbestos meant that, by 2004, almost a third of Libby’s residents suffered lung diseases such as asbestosis, lung cancer, or mesothelioma as a consequence of asbestos-related breathing.
In the months since this information became public, millions have been poured into cleaning up this small town, but only to those who were already affected.
Government funding is rapidly disappearing, leaving thousands of asbestos victims unable to get insurance because of illness and dependent on lawsuits to pull from W.R. Grace and other firms’ funds to abate the health risks asbestos-contaminated employees and customers pose.
