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Comment by drivebyadvice | Hacker News Reader

The talk in the trade is that asbestos is way overblown and it mostly affected people installing it in ships for the Navy. They worked in tight spaces with lots of asbestos in the air, lining the ship and its pipes with it, all day every day.

I don't know how true that is but I've heard the same exact story from several different contractors. I do know that getting those linoleum/asbestos floor tiles ripped up will cost you a lot to get somebody to do it for you, but there aren't any real safety precautions you need to take since it isn't getting airborne, it's basically just pure profit for the contractor.

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Many people underestimate the risks from asbestos as the disease can take 20-40 years to develop after exposure but it shouldn’t be underestimated.

Asbestosis killed over 3,600 people in 2015. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestosis

Asbestos has affected all sorts or people, not just in the Navy. A close relative of mine who was a plumber has been diagnosed with it and it is an awful disease.

This woman is dying from cancer caused by inhaling asbestos dust while washing her husband's work clothes. https://www.thompsonstradeunion.law/news/news-releases/asbes...

It’s also that relatively few people are affected. That’s approximately one in 100,000 people, twice as many people in the United States were murdered in 2015. It is really easy to know nobody who died from asbestos.

Yeah, but I don’t claim murder risk is overblown and run around badlands like I’m invincible.

Murder risk is negligible though. Especially if you aren’t directly involved in crime.

Murder risk is negligible because we do things about it.

My house has never burned down, therefor firemen, smoke alarms, and extinguishers are a scam. Got it.

No, murder risk is negligible not because you avoid going out, but because of law.

You conflated the two.

Is it because of law?

Making harsher laws doesn’t seem to reduce the murder rate. Having a death penalty doesn’t seem to stop the murders.

What are you talking about? Where is murder legal so you can compare the rates?

I did? Where did I say anything about not going out?

Is the risk of asbestos exposure when you work in construction as low as someone that doesn't?

Depends on your job - new construction shouldn't have anything to do with asbestos at all, but if you work on/demolish old buildings you might.

The only reason asbestos is becoming less and less deadly is that we banned it decades ago.

Why are averages relevant when these workers are not getting an average exposure to these materials?

I'm skeptical of the story. Husband wears asbestos ridden clothes all day, maybe wears PPE and what not, but we've tied it the cancer the wife has because of her exposure to the clothes while handling them in the wash?

Even if the husband took off his clothes, separately bagged them and then handed them to his wife to clean, it's hard to see how his exposure is less to the point where only she was diagnosed.

This is going to sound absolutely crazy to you, but you are just going to have to trust me:

Different people can have dramatically different reactions to identical things. Totally insane, right?

Given the article is from the law firm representing the client in the article, I 'm dumbfounded to see people jumping onboard in agreement and not drawing fair conclusions on causation.

Smoke usually means fire yes, but not always - could be someone heating oil on a pan.

I'm certainly on board with the belief asbestos increases likelihood of cancer. But so does driving through a dirty tunnel in peak hour traffic every day of your life. Quantifying which one were more likely to 'cause' your cancer is a not a straighforward thing.

Asbestos can cause lung cancer, but also asbestosis and mesothelioma, for both of which the only known cause is asbestos exposure.

I’ve heard of a number of these cases of wives of construction workers contracting these asbestos related diseases, it’s a population that had a higher chance of contracting them (just like construction workers themselves exposed to asbestos, of which there were many in this country). As I understand it, none of this is disputed by any of the medical science, epidemiology or experts in those fields…

Since asbestos is still around in various (mostly old) materials, it is possible to have additional exposure unknowingly, but it’s quite rare to contract something like asbestosis or mesothelioma without known exposure.

Basically asbestos presents an opportunity for things to go wrong and for you to get cancer. There isn't a discrete threshold where you have been over-exposed and now have cancer - think really shit lottery tickets.

So over a population you'd generally expect to see the incidence correlate to the level of exposure, but not in a way that precludes unusual shit like this.

My understanding is that there is not a very obvious dose response curve for mesothelioma. There are some people who had occupational exposure for their entire working life and don’t get it, while there are some people that had a small number of individual exposures and do get it. I think this is what drives a lot of people to dismiss the risks of asbestos. They work around the stuff and they work with people who work around the stuff and they don’t see people getting mesothelioma, so they assume it’s not a big deal.

Official statistics (in Spain, which is where I'm from and have read them) don't agree with that. Plenty of construction workers and various related workers, like plumbers, etc. have died from asbestos.

As an anecdote, you could even die from asbestos from working at a TV station... The Spanish public TV station used asbestos as insulation in stages and apparently, when there were vibrations from loud sound, applauses, etc., dust particles fell on the workers and public. A famous TV anchor, José María Íñigo, died from that, as well as other workers from the station.

There are different varieties of asbestos. None are good for you, but some are far more deadly than others.

Western European countries (including Spain, I am guessing) and Australia tended to use the most dangerous varieties of asbestos - crocidolite and amosite. By contrast, North America and ex-USSR countries used the less carcinogenic chrysotile.

While blue asbestos was used in some applications, the vast majority of asbestos in Australian homes is chrysolite.

There were (and are) still many mesothelioma and asbestos deaths in tradesmen building with chrysolite containing products here, as well as people whose only known exposure was renovation of houses containing it.

I had some conversations with some folks who worked in asbestos removal. In the US, everyone who touches the stuff owns it forever. The bags used to pack it have the name, license #s and contact info for the company removing it. If the landfill decides 20 years from now that they no longer want it in their landfill, your company gets to pay to remove it and then dispose of it in a new landfill.

The general feeling was that every asbestos removal company goes out of business (dissolve, chapter 7) in order to escape the permanent liability of the stuff. At which point it now becomes a SuperFund issue.

I used to make a living scanning the lungs of people who were young enough to have been told the risks.

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