So we’ve heard all these dire warnings about how we’re going to die if we touch
How dangerous is this stuff really? Are the lung cancer cases all from people who breathed the stuff daily for years in mines or pipefitting, or are there a significant number of cases from Joe Handyman who ripped it off his pipes in his basement one day because he didn’t want to pay someone to do it right.
What about these scenarios:
Homeowner used a power sander to remove an asbestos floor in his cabin (This was before they knew about the hazards)
Homeowner removed an asbestos floor (12" vinyl tile) by dumping water on the floor, then scraping them up. A lot of them broke, but a lot of them came up in one piece.
An antique has asbestos robe gasket. It’s becoming frayed, but there’s not any reason to open and close the door too often? (Consensus of collectors is they don’t worry too much about this, they either leave it alone or will remove it outdoors after soaking it with water)
School puts a “warning, asbestos” sticker on pipes, which causes kids to keep poking at it with a pencil.
There are two major types of asbestos-induced lung disease.
Asbestosis - stiffening and scarring of the lungs, from long-term exposure to asbestos
Lung cancers (i.e. both the usual type of lung cancer but also mesothelioma, a cancer of the outer lining of the lung, or sometimes of the inner lining of the abdominal wall, or even the lining around the heart) a very bad type of tumor that can develop after very brief exposure to asbestos, even decades before).
Absolutely. Smoking tobacco has all types of harmful effects.
But, you are virtually guaranteed not to develop lung cancer because you smoked for a year when you were a teen. Can’t say that for asbestos, though. Exposure to it thirty years ago for, say, one year, can definitely lead to mesotheliomas.
Let’s put some more sense into this. Asbestos is harmful as light, fluffy fibers that can be inhaled. The question now is should we allow products with asbestos, as long as the fibers cannot be released into an inhalable form?
The first one is definitely a problem, but you have to consider lifetime exposure to asbestos and other contributing factors to determine what the health impact would be. So maybe for a non-smoker with who lives in the woods and isn’t exposed to much pollution it wouldn’t make any difference at all.
In the other cases almost all the fibers may be bound up in other stuff and no significant amount of asbestos ever inhaled. But again, that lifetime exposure stuff matters.
Asbestos is still in some products on that basis, and under even less stringent controls such as brake pads. I think the idea is to remove those eventually because there are alternatives to asbestos. It’s a good idea to minimize adding asbestos to the environment, there’s enough environmental asbestos already that everyone has thousands of asbestos particles in their lungs.
My father smoked for over 40 years; for two of them, he was a 4-5 pack/day man.
And yet, the cancer that killed him is not linked to smoking; it’s linked to exposure of asbestos. He was exposed to asbestos for several months of working in the offices of a still-being-built factory. Smoking contributed to his death only in that it led doctors to assume the lung tumors they’d found were primaries, rather than realize they were secondaries to mesothelioma.
How dangerous any carcinogenic substance is for an individual will depend on that individual’s genetic makeup, and on how easy it is for that substance to reach its target. How dangerous it is for a population will depend on how frequent the substance’s target genes are within that population, and on how easy it is for that substance to reach its target.
I’m sorry for your loss, Nava. I hope you don’t mind, then, if I quote you to emphasize my earlier point:
Mdcastle: Please note with respect to your OP - only several months exposure to asbestos, a very brief time period, was enough to cause a mesothelioma (this is very different than for asbestosis, which requires extended exposure for many years).
I neglected to mention earlier that regarding the development of mesothelioma, exposure to asbestos not only need not be prolonged, it doesn’t even have to be massive. For example, the wives of men who worked with asbestos also developed mesotheliomas (presumably from doing their husbands’ asbestos-contaminated laundry (not sexist, just a different era and place).
I recall reading a report (of perhaps 15 years ago - sorry, no link) of shipyard workers that had been exposed to asbestos in their job. This correlated with a higher-than-average rate of developing asbestosis and/or mesothelioma, but (IIRC) both were significantly more common in the smokers vs. the non-smokers.
Anyone know if this has been confirmed or refuted?
That’s what I learned in college, although that was in the mid 90s so information may have changed since then. IIRC the chances of lung cancer increased if you both smoked and had asbestos exposure to an even greater degree than if you just simply added up the probabilities.
I definitely remember that smoking increases the risk of mesothelioma even though it’s not considered causitive. I searched breifly last night to see if some minimum exposure has been determined, but didn’t find anything. But all indications are that it doesn’t take much exposure, and once in the lungs asbestos tends to stay (see the thread on metal in the eye, I think it’s the same effect).
The general rule with asbestos is if it’s not exposed, leave it. This is from a friend who did asbestos removal for his job. He had a funny looking suit to wear for that, and a fancy shop-vac.
If I were the homeowner above, I wouldn’t worry too much but I’d make sure my insurance was good.
I have no idea whether wetting is sufficient, though no doubt it helps. I’ll have to ask my friend next time we talk. My guess is it’s not, and using a good filter mask would be advised. Or hiring a pro.
See this is what I don’t understand. In a nearby city, they were going to convert a Best Western Hotel into a retirement home. The paper said the cost of cleaning up the asbestos was too much so they were leaving it as a hotel.
The paper seemed to imply that asbestos is not harmful if left undisturbed and it’s only when it’s disturbed and inhaled that you have issues.
Now I don’t get how conversion would disturb this but leaving it as a hotel wouldn’t.
Good news is, the lab boys say the symptoms of asbestos poisoning show a median latency of forty-four point six years, so if you’re thirty or older, you’re laughing. Worst case scenario, you miss out on a few rounds of canasta, plus you forwarded the cause of science by three centuries. I punch those numbers into my calculator and it makes a happy face.