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1993-09-11
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Excerpts from Fort Freedom BBS, 914/941-1319 -- a pro-science,
pro-technology, pro-free enterprise oasis. Call in, its free!
EPA MAKES CARS LESS SAFE -------------------------------------- [93.065]
From Reed Irvine, "Notes From The Editor's Cuff", AIM Report 22(15)
(1993 August-A):
In 1989, EPA ordered that the use of asbestos in brake
linings be phased out by 1996. In October 1991, the Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals nullified this regulation, but
manufacturers had already begun switching to substitutes.
The substitute linings couldn't stand the heat. Larry
Strawbridge, an engineer with the American Trucking
Association, said the linings on trucks were literally
exploding. They also caused the brake drums to overheat,
cracking the drums and causing them to disintegrate. Arne
Anderson, a retired researcher for Ford Motor Co., says he
knows of at least five fatal accidents caused by fragmenting
brake drums on tractor-trailers. Two accidents came to light
at the end of July in the Washington, D.C. area. In one, a
young mother was killed when a 27-lb. brake drum fragment
hurled through the window of the vehicle she was riding. In
the other, a month earlier, a little girl was struck by a
piece of brake drum and 20 fragments of her skull had to be
wired together to save her life. Larry Strawbridge says the
technology has been greatly improved and the number of
problems with the new brake linings has been greatly
reduced, though they still aren't as good as the asbestos
linings. The National Highway Traffic and Safety Agency has
no records on accidents caused by ballistic brake drums.
Strawbridge says two in the same area within a month is a
freak, like lightning striking twice.
The EPA justified its ban on asbestos brake linings with the
claim that it would save 12 to 15 lives a year. Judge Steven
Breyer, the Fifth Circuit judge who was on President
Clinton's short list for the Supreme Court nomination, says
that twice as many people will die from swallowing
toothpicks as from asbestos. An EPA spokesman told me that
asbestos is more dangerous than toothpicks because you can't
see the fibers you inhale and it may be years before you
develop any health problems from inhaling them. But
personally, I would prefer exposure to the fibers from
asbestos brake linings to risking decapitation by a
ballistic brake drum.
AIM Report is published twice monthly by Accuracy In Media, Inc., 4455
Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 330, Washington, D.C. 20008. Tel: 202-364-
4401; Fax: 202-364-4098.
ASBESTOS AND HEALTH: A PRIMER --------------------------------- [93.064]
"Asbestos" is a commercial term for a group of fibrous minerals. There
are six forms of asbestos, three of which have been widely used
commercially. Those three are chrysotile ("white asbestos"), which
represent 90% of all asbestos mined, amosite ("brown asbestos"), 2.7%,
and crocidolite ("blue asbestos"), 2.2%. Asbestos minerals are classed
as either serpentine, which have curly fibers, or amphibole, which have
rod-shaped fibers. The name `amphibole' derives from the Late Latin
amphibolus, ambiguous, from the mineral's many varieties. Rod-shaped
fibers are the most harmful. Chrysotile (Mg6-Si4-O11(OH)6oH2O), the most
commonly used asbestos, is a serpentine mineral. Amosite ("brown
asbestos") and crocidolite ("blue asbestos") are amphibole minerals.
Asbestos fibers are naturally present in the air, for weathering exposes
outcroppings of asbestos, and the fibers are blown about by the wind
In the early days, working conditions for asbestos workers were quite
poor. Asbestos dust was so thick in the air that often workers had
difficulty seeing clearly. Dust concentrations ranged from 20 to 100 or
more fibers per cubic centimeter (f/cc) of air. This is tens to hundreds
of times greater than what is considered safe today by the health
authorities of Canada and England. For context, note that the air in
U.S. cities has 0.0005 f/cc and that the air in U.S. buildings with
friable (crumbly) asbestos has 0.00064 f/cc.
That asbestos workers suffer illnesses peculiar to their occupation has
been known since almost the beginning of this century. In 1906, H.
Montagu-Murray reported a case of fibrosis of the lungs of an asbestos
worker to the British Departmental Committee on Industrial diseases,
though his account was not published in the medical literature. W.E.
Cook's paper, "Pulmonary Asbestosis", published in the British Medical
Journal in 1927, made the disease known to the medical community. By the
1930s, England and Germany had industrial regulations controlling
workers' exposure to asbestos dust. The great English epidemiologist Sir
Richard Doll studied English asbestos workers in the 1950s. In America,
during the '50s and '60s, Dr Irving J. Selikoff studied insulation
workers who had worked in shipyards during the Second World War. These
workers worked with amosite ("brown asbestos") and crocidolite ("blue
asbestos"). Dr Selikoff did valuable work, but was also a zealot who
made careless statements to the press about the hazards of asbestos. In
1960, J.C. Wagner of the Pneumicosis Institute in Cardiff, Wales,
published a paper demonstrating a connection between asbestos and
mesothioloma.
Epidemiologists have found that asbestos workers who are exposed to high
air concentrations of asbestos fibers (tens to hundreds or more f/cc)
have an elevated risk of affliction with (1) lung cancer, (2)
mesothioloma (cancer of the membranes (a) lining the lungs and the
inside of the cavity containing the lungs (pleural cavity), and (b)
lining the abdominal cavity and the abdominal organs), and (3)
asbestosis, a condition where the lung tissues become fibrous and
inelastic. Cigarette smoking has an overwhelming influence in the
induction of asbestos-associated disease. Asbestos workers who had been
exposed to asbestos for twenty years had a lung-cancer incidence ten
times that of those who did not work with asbestos. The asbestos workers
who smoked had an 800-fold greater incidence of lung cancer than did
non-asbestow workers, and most asbestos workers were heavy smokers.
The various kinds of asbestos pose different risks to human health. In
order of harmfulness (least to most): chrysotile ("white"), amosite
("brown"), crocidolite ("blue"). Chrysotile causes no increase in any
disease if its concentration in air is less than about one fiber per
cubic centimeter (f/cc) of air. Workers who have spent as little three
months in crocidolite mines have greatly increased their risks of
developing mesothioloma. "England and Canada did in-depth appraisals of
the asbestos question. Both agreed that crocidolite (blue asbestos)
should be banned, amosite (brown) used only under very stringent control
standards, and chrysotile (white) continued in use and controlled to 1
f/cc." (Kinney 1990, p. 118)
The following table puts the concentration figures in context:
Sample Set No. of Fiber
(Air) Samples Concentration
f/cm^3
Historical exposures (nominal) n/a 20-100+
12% excess of lung cancer (chrysotile) n/a 10-21
OSHA (1989) n/a 0.2
U.S. buildings with friable asbestos 54 0.64 (-3)*
U.S. schoolrooms without asbestos 31 0.53 (-3)*
48 U.S. Cities 187 0.5 (-3)*
U.S. buildings with cementitious asbestos 28 0.26 (-3)*
Paris building with asbestos surfaces 135 0.06 (-3)*
*median value.
Sources: Data from Bennett 1991, pp. 97, 181, 207 and Ross 1987, p. 111.
Though the health effects of high (tens to hundreds or more f/cc) air
concentrations of asbestos fibers were well known to medicine and
governments by the 1930s, American business and government acted
shabbily in protecting workers, as narrated in the following from
Michael J. Bennett, The Asbestos Racket (1991), pp. 97-98:
The U.S. Department of Labor, acting under the Walsh-Healey
Act of 1938 [the first law providing federal protection of
workers' safety and health], did not get around to setting a
permissible exposure limit (PEL) to asbestos in the
workplace until 1969. Then, it set the limit at 12 fibers
per cubic centimeter (f/cc), although the U.S. Public Health
Service recommended 5 f/cc in 1938. ...
There can be no dispute that the U.S. Government, as well as
the asbestos industry, was negligent in failing to regulate
exposure to asbestos much earlier. The negligence, in fact,
may even have been a matter of public policy dictated
directly from the White House. A letter dated March 11,
1941, from Cmdr. C. S. Stephenson, USN, officer-in-charge of
preventive medicine for the Navy concedes serious health
problems existed with asbestos: "Asbestosis: We are having a
considerable amount of work done with asbestos and from my
observations we are not protecting the men as we should.
This is a matter of official report from several of our navy
yards."
Nevertheless, Stephenson, in the letter retrieved from the
National Archives, justified a policy of refusing to allow
inspectors from the Labor Department and the U.S. Public
Health Service to inspect working conditions in yards
directly or indirectly run by the Navy. Two reasons were
given: 1. The Navy already "had medical officers in the
yards," and 2. "President Roosevelt thought this might not
be the best policy, due to the fact that they [the Labor
Department and Public Health inspectors] might cause
disturbance in the labor element."
Studies of these workers, who were exposed to amosite ("brown asbestos")
and crocidolite ("blue asbestos"), were the shaky basis of the panic-
mongering in the late '70s and most of the decade of the '80s by
environmentalists and federal bureaucrats, who warned about asbestos is
buildings. Ninety-five percent of the asbestos used in buildings in the
United States is chrysotile. Indeed, most of the asbestos used by
industry in this country is chrysotile. Expert committees in England and
Canada both concluded that chrysotile (white) asbestos should continue
to be used so long as fibers in the air are controlled to 1 f/cc. In
1985, EPA estimated that a ban on all future uses of asbestos would save
107 to 108 lives per year, though its experts admitted that these values
may be 800-fold too high. Further, such high-dose-to-low dose
extrapolations have absolutely no basis is any science. They are
sophisticated science-fiction.
Chrysotile asbestos is safe with proper controls. There is no scientific
reason to abondon use of it.
MORE
Bennett, Michael J. The Asbestos Racket. Bellevue, WA: Free Enterprise
Press, 1991.
Kinney, John E. "The Asbestos Distortion" in Jay H. Lehr, Ed. Rational
Readings on Environmental Concerns (NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold,
1992), pp. 101-115. Originally published in 1990 by the National
Council for Environmental Balance.
Ross, Malcolm. "Minerals and Health: The Asbestos Problem" in Jay H.
Lehr, Ed. Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns (NY: Van
Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), pp. 101-115. Originally published in
Proceedings of the 21st Forum on the Geology of Industrial Minerals,
1987.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Asbestos Removal Fiasco
By Philip H. Abelson
[Mr Abelson is a Deputy Editor of Science magazine.]
[Editorial from Science 247:1017 (1990 Mar 2 ).]
[704 words]
Removal of asbestos from buildings could cost as much as $50 to $150
billion. The content of asbestos fibers in the air of buildings
containing asbestos is harmlessly small and essentially the same as
outdoor air [B.T. Mossman et al., Science 247:294 (1990)]. Asbestos in
buildings, unless damaged, does not shed fibers. The removal process
releases asbestos fibers which could result in more cancer in the
workmen than would have resulted in the usual occupants had the asbestos
been left in place.
A puzzling defect in federal legislation and regulations is an arbitrary
lumping together of disparate minerals and calling the lot of them
asbestos. As a result, chrysotile, a serpentine mineral, is tarred with
association with the dangerous amphibole crocidolite. The two minerals
differ in composition, color, shape, solubility, and persistence in
human tissue. Chrysotile is white mineral with composition
Mg6Si4O10(OH)8. It tends to be soluble and to disappear in tissue.
Fibers tend to be curly and excluded from the periphery of the lung.
Crocidolite is blue, has the formula Na2(Fe3+)2(Fe2+)3Si8O22(OH)2, and
is relatively insoluble. It persists in tissue. Its fibers are long,
thin, and straight and penetrate narrow lung passages. About 95 percent
of the asbestos in place in the United States is chrysotile.
Another puzzling defect in federal performance is failure to give
sufficient weight to epidemiological experience relating to chrysotile
mines in Quebec. These mines have been operating since before 1900 and
have produced about 40 million tons of chrysotile. In keeping with the
lax practice of earlier days, mining operations were accompanied by
large amounts of chrysotile dust. Wives of miners were heavily exposed;
they dwelt in homes near the mines. Four epidemiological studies of the
Quebec chrysotile mining localities show that lifelong exposure of women
to dust from nearby mines caused no statistically significant excess
disease.
The Environmental Protection Agency has fostered the view that a single
fiber can cause cancer. This hypothesis is unproven. We live on a planet
on which there is an abundance of serpentine-and amphibole-containing
rocks. Natural processes have been releasing fibers throughout Earth
history. We breathe about 1 million fibers a year.
Another puzzle is a lack of expeditious effort by the EPA to obtain
rigorous measures of indoor and outdoor levels of fibers. It is only
recently that appropriate measurements have been made using transmission
electron microscopy. Use of this equipment permits identification and
quantitation of asbestos fibers. One would think that in a $50- to $150-
billion program the first priority would be an accurate assessment of
the problem. This lack of concern about determining the facts of
exposure is also reflected in EPA policies with respect to schools.
Public and private schools are required to inspect for asbestos and to
inform parents if asbestos-containing materials are present. Schools
must submit a plan detailing how they will deal with damaged asbestos.
They can be fined $5000 per day for failing to meet deadlines. The EPA
has recommended bulk sampling and visual inspection to determine a
course of action rather than measurements of airborne levels of fibers.
The removal process releases fibers into the air, sometimes creating
greater concentrations of them than before the abatement work began.
Remedial workers are being exposed to high occupational levels. EPA
itself estimates that one half of all asbestos removal projects are done
improperly.
Panic has not been confined to schools. Building owners broadly have
been ripping out asbestos. If anything, the rush to remove asbestos is
accelerating. EPA requires that asbestos be taken out of buildings
before they are demolished or renovated. In addition, some owners have
noted that the presence of asbestos has made it difficult to lease,
sell, or insure asbestos-containing buildings. The Environmental
Contractor has published an estimate that this year $7 billion will be
spent on asbestos abatement -- an increase of more than 30 percent
during 1989. The estimate for 1993 is $11.5 billion.
The credibility of EPA has already been damaged. Unless policies are
modified, the sums wasted in abatement and litigation will proliferate.
Regulations should be modified to take into account the greatly
differing hazards of the various asbestiform minerals. Standards for
indoor air should be based on actual measurements of types and amounts
of fibers.