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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

Asbestos is genuinely more terrifying then nuclear radiation.

If something is radioactive then a Geiger counter will tell you at a distance, it'll even triangulate it.

Asbestos? It can be everywhere and the only way to know is to collect samples, pay $100 a piece to a lab to do phase contrast microscopy and wait.

Then do it again the next time you find something suspicious.

And once you've cleaned it out..well hope your handling was good coz who knows if you got it all - without collecting a lot of samples and testing again.

My house has a few asbestos pieces, and in digging up the yard I've pulled a huge amount of asbestos fiber cement from cheap renovations by previous owners - the stuff was about 10 cm below the surface.

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Its carcinogenic “modus operandi” is also completely different to anything else. Asbestos is chemically inert, so how does is cause cancer? The tiny crystalline needles puncture cells, sometimes during cell division, and strands of dna will get tangled up and result in messed up genetics.

Yes and I would like to add, it is all about the "dose". It is a common misconception that tangled DNA will automatically lead to spreading cancer. Per day a normal person develops tangled up dna cells in the hundreds, that is a normal process, but the immune system can handle it without problems and can get rid of it (unfortunately not always). So with Asbestos it is all about the dose too. Although a relative small amount could be already _potential_ harmful.

I'm not a doctor or researcher in that field, but my understanding is that cancer is not 'one disease', but rather a huge number of different diseases which mostly have in common that they develop some kind of tumors.

That's also one reason why progress in cancer research and drug development is so slow. 'Fix' one cancer, and what you've developed likely has little effect on the zillion other cancer variants.

Mesothelioma caused by asbestos is only a single disease. It has a known cause. It has been well researched. The causal links are clear: prevention is the answer. It doesn't matter that other cancers are different diseases, that is irrelevant to mesothelioma caused by asbestos.

Yes, I agree with all of the above. I was just pointing out that cancer from asbestos being different from other cancers isn't so unique since a lot of cancers are different from all other cancers.

It's not at all uncommon. Virtually everything that has tiny sharp pieces in it, will work like that. Graphene for instance.

You’re correct. Iirc the blueish smoke from car tires share a similar property.

Which cheese from Lidl do you recommend? I'm in the UK.

IIRC, asbestos does not directly cause cells to become cancerous, but it is an irritant that reawakens cancerous cells the body had forced into dormancy.

If it's intact and below surface the risk is far lower. You have to worry about airborne asbestos.

Not saying you should ignore it but don't dig it up without knowing what you're in for.

I went on this trip too, and while yes asbestos is bad, white asbestos (by far the most common type, mined and used) is way less likely to cause the type of damage you're describing, brown and blue asbestos are more inline with what you describe. But even then, people who lived in Wittenoom, WA are still alive today.

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