Why is asbestos still killing people? | Hacker News Reader

Why is asbestos still killing people?

mosaicscience.com

101 pointsmr_tyzic49 comments

In California there's a large asbestos deposit near the town of Coalinga. Two of the mines were cleaned up under the EPA "superfund". The surrounding area also contains a toxic mercury mine called New Idria. The whole region is remote and favored by hunters, campers, and motorcyclists.

The funny thing about this site is how polarizing it is. The EPA claims victory in cleaning up the mines, but geologists point out that tectonic activity and erosion liberate and transport millions of cubic yards of asbestos. The BLM says the area is closed, but motorcycle clubs still trespass. Some people say that the local asbestos isn't dangerous because it's fluffier/shorter/longer/curlier than others that are dangerous. Rural people say the closure is a coastal, liberal conspiracy. Complete opposite opinions are expressed in apparently respectable peer-reviewed scientific journals.

I don't know what to believe. Maybe the rednecks are right, it's a perfectly good place to tear it up on your dirt bike. Or maybe it's insanely dangerous, and the uncertainty is caused by industry disinformation campaigns. Who knows.

That's interesting. I stopped at a McDonald's very near Coalinga* and on the take out window it read verbatim:

"Chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer, or birth defects or other reproductive harm may be present in foods or beverages sold or served here.

Such chemicals are also present in this area and in consumer products and other items sold, provided, and used here."

And wondered why this was on window. Now I know. Still decent cheeseburger though I don't care.

*https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Coalinga,+CA/McDonald's,+275...

Pretty much every building in California has those warnings. Cars sold in California have a sticker on the driver window with that warning.

Ha, that's weird, I guess I've noticed them before.

Yeah, it's a warning that was passed by ballot initiative. If the initiative had said "Warning: this building is known to contain body thetans" then they'd have to print that on the sign. Welcome to California.

As a non-CA resident I've benefitted from these stickers. One time I was given a bar set which included a shaker which had a sticker on it that said something along the lines of "This product contains lead paint which the state of California has found to be hazardous…"

It goes farther. Every single cable (USB, HDMI, ethernet... that kind of cable) you buy will come with the same label "this product contains lead, a chemical known to the state of California to cause birth defects etc etc etc". It might have more of an effect if there were any cables that didn't come with the warning.

Presumably not ones assembled with lead-free solder? (not that the plastics are likely much safer by Californian standards, but still)

It's not usually the solder, often the rubber in the cable contains some white lead.

Unfortunately, a lot of the Prop 65 warning labels don't even say what particular substance they're warning you about. And I've even seen such stickers on pieces of solid wood, warning the consumer because wood dust is a _suspected_ carcinogen when inhaled.

To me, these labels are useless and dangerous for the same reason a lot of anti-drug education/propaganda is bad: it doesn't do anything to inform you about the relative level of danger. e.g. regardless of the affects of the drug itself, smoking a joint is _much_ less dangerous than injecting any substance with needles/syringes/etc which are not sterile.

I bought some graphite a few years ago to lubricate a sticking lock. The label on the tube told me that graphite is known to the state of California as a carcinogen. I reflected on the pencils I and everyone else had sharpened over the years, and wondered what if any abatement measures are present in California classrooms.

The graphite worked nicely on the lock.

I don't live in California, but sometimes fly in for work. I've joked that the pilot should just announce as they are crossing the border that "The State of California is known by the State of California to cause cancer." and call it a day.

Another fun thing to do is to point the signs out to a California resident, who has probably long since completely edited them out of existence. It causes a "can't unsee!" reaction for about a week for certain people.

I don't know however I suddenly have the urge to make a few asbestos grinding machines to plant them in the ventilation system of these big asbestos companies and their disinformation allies as an "experiment".

On a more serious note if I were any of the people affected by this I would actually make it as one of my goals before i die.

There's no better revenge then killing you with your own poison especially when it take years for the effects to be noticed.

Hey if they are right nothing will happen to them right?

California's state rock, Serpentine, contains asbestos.

I come from one of the towns mentioned in the article, Thetford Mines (they somehow misspelled it), which is about 45 minutes drive from Asbestos. Reading the local newspaper is always entertaining, it seems everyone in town has an opinion about the fibre, and most of the time it's a positive one too. If some MP dares speak against it, everyone gets mad.

Anyways, people live there and as a child it's normal to go play in the dump sites, which have a strange white-greenish color due to the mineral. You pick up a "bearded rock" as we call them, the beard being the asbestos fibre, and stash them in your bedroom or whatever kids do with rocks.

Needless to say, living now in the States and telling people about those stories (which I considered normal, who wouldn't play with an asbestos-laden rocks?) always brings up interesting reactions. I was told (by the local newspaper) that you can't breath the big fibres, that it's once they're processed that they're dangerous, so I do wonder if I still have some it in me...

The thing about Mesothelioma is that it doesn't show up for a long time - sometimes 20 years or more. That's what makes asbestos so devious - it's easy for corporations to deny injuries they caused people 20 years and billions of dollars of profit later. If you think this isn't happening in the US anymore (a misconception a lot of people have) - I would recommend you read up on it: http://www.takejusticeback.com/Asbestos

I took a geology class at Stanford when I was an undergrad, and we went to that deposit/mine on a field trip. My professor claimed that the type of asbestos present at the mine was harmless since the mineral structure was a large fiber, and it didn't effect our lungs the way smaller fiber-ed asbestos does (different versions of serpentine, essentially). He made the argument that there was safe asbestos and unsafe asbestos. We them proceeded to walk all over it and collect some samples by hand.

But I'm not sure who to believe nowadays, especially after reading this article. Makes the whole industry sound pretty scummy and doesn't allude to there being a "safe" version of asbestos. (My professor never told us about how the asbestos industry basically funded all sorts of propaganda in favor of the stuff.)

That's interesting. I know undergrads from UCSC also use the site. I guess I trust geologists to describe the material, its fiber diameter and length and whether the fibers are straight or curved, soluble or insoluble, and so forth. I don't think I would listen to geologists on matters of disease, though :-)

I've been to this area a number of times. I'm comfortable with it because if you do the math, it's pretty darn hard to poison open air. Working with the material in confined spaces may be suicidal. Walking on it under an open sky seems harmless.

Australia, which was a big miner and user of asbestos, has the highest per capita rate of new mesothelioma cases in the world and it is still rising. These new diagnoses are considered the 'third wave' of casualties. First wave was the miners, second wave were people who worked directly with the material, and the third wave are people with incidental exposure - DIYers, women who washed their husbands' clothes etc. [1]

Bans on the use of asbestos began in Australia in 1967 and the material was finally fully banned in the country in 2003. [2]

[1] http://www.theage.com.au/national/still-breathing-the-devils...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos#Australia

What a fascinating article. I think everyone in my age group should read this as a lot of people don't really know the history behind asbestos & why it's so bad. It's just not discussed.

It was very topical when I grew up. Manly because there was a very poorly run mine in my country which turned out to be probably our worst industrial disaster. There were a lot of victims claiming compensation and it entered into popular culture through music such as Midnight Oil's "Blue Sky Mining Company" and books.

http://www.asbestosdiseases.org.au/the-wittenoom-tragedy.htm... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3LDoI7H1Gc

The dangers of asbestos had been known for some time but it took a long time for public health to catch up and like tobacco and leaded fuel, the industry worked hard to deny the problem.

I expect the risks from occupational exposure have dropped a lot with replacement products and special handling and safety gear. I have seen suggestions that the next wave of victims would be DIY home renovators.

I wish i wanted anything else to happen. Yesterday i thought, if anything about mesothelioma would be on top news in hn ever, as my mother diagnosed with mesothelioma stage 1 last month, however no cure exists for now unlike other cancer types with the same stage. Everyday i'm searching google if any curative treatments/clinical trials started in the last 24h. We think she has exposed to aspestos from paintings of the house wall in her village, as it was spread to use "white lime" for that purpose.

  Fibre cement is a composite building and construction 
  material, used mainly in roofing and facade products 
  because of its strength, durability and fire-resistance.

  Invented in the late 19th century by the Austrian Ludwig 
  Hatschek. Principally he mixed 90% cement and 10% 
  asbestos fibres with water and ran it through a cardboard 
  machine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibre_cement

Many factory workers, roofer, etc. died of cancer or will die in future :(

Many houses in central Europe and elsewhere have fibre cement roofing made of asbestos. Since ca. 1990 all fibre cement shingles are 100% asbestos free.

They are still building with it in Goa. When I was there the "Environment Minister" of Goa was saying it was anti-indian people in the West saying it was posion

I wonder - to what extent was his opinion based on the PR campaigns a few years by the Canadian government aimed at convincing countries like India to buy their asbestos?

Not much, I expect; they mine it in Goa too.

With my experience of Indian life, I wouldn't be in the slightest surprised if the Environment Minister owned the mine.

At the University of Washington dorms, the older ones at least, there are still exposed pipe coverings with asbestos fibers and a big fat warning sticker saying to avoid creating dust... I imagine it'll be a nightmare when they finally tear them down.

Asbestos abatement is pretty much a solved problem now. Which doesn't make it any easier or cheaper. The workers basically seal off the area with plastic sheets (tightly taped at the edges), suit up with respirators, and double-bag anything they remove.

Like the sign says - as long as you leave it alone, it won't create dust. Especially if it's been painted at some time, to seal the surface. So no Frisbee in the halls..

This article talks about asbestos being identified as carcinogenic in the 1920's, but the ancient Greeks knew not to buy slaves from the asbestos mines.

But I bet they didn't diagnose it as "cancer", just "will die soon"

Are you sure? The word cancer comes from Greek - Hippocrates named it Karkinos, which was translated into the latin cancer a few hundred years later. The name explicitly comes from the appearance of a cancerous tumour.

Asbestos dust is certainly a terrible thing to breathe in, but I think there's a lot of over-hype on the dangers of asbestos. I worked closely with contractors last year, and they all said the same thing, that asbestos fears were largely overblown.

The government and real estate agents treat it as if it's nuclear waste, but being around asbestos isn't guaranteed to give you lung cancer. It's only when you create a dust from it by grinding it, and if it gets airborne. There are main mitigation techniques that can control asbestos pretty easily. Having it in your house isn't terrible as long as you deal with it properly.

The problem is that the layman doesn't know / have the capability to detect asbestos or properly control it. Fissionable material can be safe if you properly control it, but we don't let people play around with that.

The other problem is that it's easy to accidently make dust out of otherwise 'safe' asbestos, at which point it's too late. For example, hit and break a wall for whatever reason (put a hole in an internal wall, fallen branch hitting a roof), or drop some sort of heat-resistant cooking device that breaks when it hits the floor. It's one of those things where even if you do know of the risks, the possiblity of it being accidently realised is significant.

I fully acknowledge that some of the material properties of asbestos are truly amazing - its heat resistence is incredible and we'd be well served finding a safe equivalent - but on balance it is simply not enough to justify its use in applications where the layman can be exposed to it.

I'm not saying we should continue to use it and I'm not saying that it's perfectly safe. But if you were to ask regular people about asbestos, I would wager that most of them think that if you are exposed to any sort of asbestos, you're going to get lung cancer immediately. Scaring people to the point where people are misinformed from word-of-mouth doesn't make it any safer.

For example, many houses in the Bay Area have asbestos in it, so it's not like having it in your house is going to kill you. You need to deal with it intelligently, but just having asbestos in your home isn't going to kill you. And even then, unless you're breathing it in all the time, you're not automatically going to get lung cancer, just like if you get a CT scan with a radiation exposure equivalent to hundreds of X-rays, you're not automatically going to get cancer. Proper education is important. Sure, lots of people tragically got lung cancer due to heavy exposure, but some exposure won't guarantee anything bad, but it certainly feels like you will based on how people talk about it.

Most contractors, if they know or are unsure will not touch certain jobs with a 10ft pole for fear of asbestos. In older houses in the Bay Area, likely culprits are old tile, the glue used, or old ducting.

With care, most of this can be removed with little risk. However, as you point out, caution is needed and most DIYers may not think about things. The other extreme is calling in the men in bunny suits that will run multiple thousands for even small issues due to permits, precautions, and disposal.

Are they afraid for their lives or the lives of their crews, or afraid of the liability?

Statistically, the DIYers need not really think about it, either. If you work with it at most a few days of your life. you can be the unlucky guy who breathes in a lot of asbestos dust and dies, but chances are you won't (if you don't go berserk when demolishing a building, and are smart enough to wear a mouth/nose cap when working inside in dust)

Professionals in the industry, on the other hand, may work way more carefully, but still run a much larger risk of adverse effects due to their longer exposure time. That's another reason the men work in bunny suits.

It certainly doesn't help that (supposedly) only some types of asbestos are dangerous.

The white asbestos (chrysotile) that the article talks about is listed as a carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the US Dept of Health.

Right, what I mean is all asbestos is treated as if it was chrysotile, when not all is. That kind of contributes to the feeling of "wow are we overblowing this?"- even if we aren't.

From what I've read, all the other kinds of asbestos are definitely, obviously terrifying. The debate is whether chrysotile, or some variants of it, are dangerous and to what degree.

From the US National Institute of Health (NIH) report on Asbestos. First sentence:

Asbestos and all commercial forms of asbestos are known to be human carcinogens based on sufﬁcient evidence of carcinogenicity in humans.

You can read the rest if you want more info:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110429155522/http://ntp.niehs.n...

My grandfather died of mesothelioma from asbestos last year. Other than that he was 89 years old and otherwise in fantastic shape for his age, tending a multi-acre garden and working on landscaping. He was not a carpenter, nor was he a contractor. He ran a boiler at a sugar cane processing plant. The only time he was exposed to asbestos was in the day to day operations of that facility. He was not an employee at the time that it was built.

There some asbestos products where the fibres can easily get into the air like lagging and others where they are bonded in side some product like a cement and it isn't a risk if you leave it alone. The risk for average people is home renovation as asbestos was used in a huge variety of building products and it isn't always obvious. Clearly you can do things to mitigate the risk.

It seems to kill people randomly.

A family member used to work for a company that produced asbestos cement products. I can still remember touring the factory as a child: the grinding machines shaping the pipe couplings, standing on top of the dust collector as it was being emptied, the sealed room at the beginning of the production line into which the raw asbestos was being blown. (I only looked through the glass door of that one, though I gather it wasn't unknown for people to be locked in there for a joke, whilst workmates enjoyed the "snow show".)

Yet, for that, some people who worked at the company are still healthy (and being regularly monitored), whilst others are dead from mesothelioma. It's as if some people are susceptible, whilst others aren't, and size of dose isn't the overriding factor.

I don't think it's overblown, in that people do die (unpleasantly) from minimal exposure to asbestos. Perhaps that's why asbestos is treated so gingerly: to some people it is as dangerous as nuclear waste and we don't know who those people are?

--- Edit: final question mark.

Sounds like smoking. Some smokers still manage to live healthy lives into their 90s, but the majority don't. I wonder what the exact numbers are for mesothelioma.

You are arguing that we should use anecdotal evidence to guide public health policy. Please stop doing that and use a scientific approach instead.

I remember when I was a carpenter apprentice and asked for personal safety equipment and then being told that "wood dust never harmed anyone" or "I never use hearing protection and my hearing is just fine". I have encountered this attitude in many places, especially in small companies where not following safety rules can be seen directly in the profits. But you also see it in big projects, where the main contractor hires sub-contractors that hires sub-sub-contractors and no one has an overall responsibility.

I don't know why you have been down-voted. You are correct, and most of the replies to the contrary are along the lines of "I knew someone who worked in an Asbestos-heavy-industrial environment and they died from it so therefore it's all dangerous."

For most members of the public, our interaction with Asbestos will be from it's use as a building material for roofs, insulation or pipes. The risk only increases if it is heavily disturbed, usually due to building work or demolition.

What you're observing has little to do with asbestos, lead paint, etc, and everything to do with the way realtors/government operate. That being said, I've worked on probable lead-painted materials before but wouldn't want to deal with asbestos.

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