Current Shareware 1994 January/SHAR194.ISO/textfile/envfacts.zip/ASBESTOS.TXT

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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: [phone].

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.