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> However, in general, people who become ill from inhaling asbestos have been regularly exposed in a job where they worked directly with the material.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_impact_of_asbestos

> Asbestos can be found naturally in the air outdoors and in some drinkable water, including water from natural sources. Even nonoccupationally exposed members of the human population have tens to hundreds of thousands of asbestos fibers per gram of dry lung tissue, equivalent to millions of fibers in each lung.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_impact_of_asbestos#Envi...

OMG we're all gonna get mesothelioma from the asbestos that is normally found outdoors, unrelated to man-made activity!

Again, I stand by what I said. The risks of asbestos to ordinary people are way overblown. It has to be loose and you have to be exposed to a lot of it for a long period of time. Regular people are fine.

Edit: ya know people, you could respond to the specific claims instead of pressing the "I disagree" button. Is asbestos a dangerous substance? Yes, in certain circumstances. Are those circumstances something normal people need to be concerned about? No, not unless you work with the substance every day and without proper precautions.




> Asbestos can be found naturally in the air outdoors and in some drinkable water, including water from natural sources. Even nonoccupationally exposed members of the human population have tens to hundreds of thousands of asbestos fibers per gram of dry lung tissue, equivalent to millions of fibers in each lung.

If you're using this as an argument that increased asbestos exposure has no correlation to negative health outcomes, then you are contradicting the scientific literature for the sake of making a naturalistic fallacy. Why are you doing that? It's just a strange attempt at an argument.

> OMG we're all gonna get mesothelioma from the asbestos that is normally found outdoors, unrelated to man-made activity!

Again, because something appears in nature does not mean that it isn't positively correlated to negative health outcomes and that we shouldn't minimize it. That just point blank is not an actual argument.

If you want to make an argument for your position you will need to cite research that increased asbestos exposure does not significantly increase negative health outcomes, which will be hard because it's well studied and the research is pretty conclusively against you.

To illucidate why your argument isn't valid at a basic level, you can apply it to other things. Cyanide is present in almond plants and a byproduct of metabolizing apple seeds. Does that mean we should lax regulations around how much we systematically increase people's exposure to cyanide? What about radiation? People are exposed to ionizing background radiation every day. Do you think that somehow means that increasing that radiation exposure won't increase rates of cancer?


The study linked in the article itself, indicates that the current state of scientific understanding is that water born and skin contact are not significant issues for asbestos, and the primary concern is inhalation. Took me only 5 minutes to find it looking through the docs.

I am not agreeing with the GP on their theory of "overblown". Asbestos initiated cancers seem to be some of those with no known threshold. That is, there is no safe amount of asbestos dust inhalation above which you get cancer.

I am disagreeing with your statement on the scientific literature and consensus. As far as I know (not my field, so I am an outsider looking at literature), there is no strong consensus either way. There are hypotheses that need deeper looks [1][2][3][4][5]. That is, it looks like there may be something there, but the investigators can't as of yet, distinguish between this as causal versus other factors.

This does not mean I think it is safe to ingest a bowl of asbestos followed by an asbestos flavored adult drink. What it does mean is that evidence is inconclusive, though there are a few pathways researchers could imagine would make sense as a causative.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28276807

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27919155

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15820729

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3304998

[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21534087

[minor update to add a missing "be" ]


for the sake of making a naturalistic fallacy.

That's not at all what the parent comment did.


So your argument is, because people get mesothelioma from living near natural deposits of asbestos, we should put more of the stuff in our homes? "What's a little more cancer?"

Your own source material shows just living near asbestos gives you higher risk of cancer. You're trying to argue that we aren't at significant risk without prolonged exposure. Living with asbestos is prolonged exposure. Increasing the amount used in products that we all live around/near will increase the risk and incidence of cancers.


Smoke detectors have a radioactive source, and we put them inside our homes, because the radiation level is so low that the increase of the risk is minimal.

Walls have a tiny amount of radioactive material, but they protect you from the radiation of the exterior. I don't know if the walls increase or decrease your cancer risk.

There are many thinks that may cause cancer. It's important to calculate the risk of each one, because you can't avoid all of them.


Only industrial smoke alarms use radioactive sources and even then only some types (you need different types for different situations).

The radioactivity in a smoke alarm is already negligible when you hold it in your hand, never mind when it's mounted on a ceiling.

Additionally the americium-241 used in smoke detectors is mainly alpha decay and a sheet of paper will stop it, the remaining radiation that is dangerous is gamma and it's exposure is so far below annual average background that you might not even bother. Flying in a plane will expose you to a thousand times more radiation.


Nit: most smoke detectors don't use radioactive materials anymore - they are inferior to the infrared sensors that operate on the same principals.


If 55 other developed nations can ban use of asbestos, we can too. There's no need to calculate the risk if we can just avoid it entirely. Why poison yourself if you don't need to?


https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/asbestos/

The difference between asbestos and radiation is that there is no "safe" amount of asbestos exposure, according to OSHA.


There seems to be group think present even here on HN. I don't downvote comments if that at least attempt to make a coherent argument with supporting facts.

But, when I got rid of asbestos insulation around some water pipes I followed every precaution. But many people seem to think chlorine isn't toxic because it's so common.

Note: There is _no_ known antidote to chlorine poisoning. (an example of how there is a toxin around us everyday, in our drinking water, in our pools, on our clothes, cleaning products, etc...) Why is there no outrage over this?

https://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/chlorine/basics/facts.asp

More on asbestos many people may not know that I got from the same wikipedia entry.

"Portions of El Dorado County, California are known to contain natural amphibole asbestos formations at the surface. The USGS studied amphiboles in rock and soil in the area in response to an EPA sampling study and subsequent criticism of the EPA study. The EPA study was refuted by its own peer reviewers and never completed or published."

"Globally, samples collected from Antarctic ice indicate chrysotile asbestos has been a ubiquitous contaminant of the environment for at least 10,000 years."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_impact_of_asbestos#Envi...


> But many people seem to think chlorine isn't toxic because it's so common.

> Note: There is _no_ known antidote to chlorine poisoning. (an example of how there is a toxin around us everyday, in our drinking water, in our pools, on our clothes, cleaning products, etc...) Why is there no outrage over this?

There’s probably no credible outrage for two major reasons:

- Chlorine in water is not actually a meaningful problem. Unlike, say, asbestos, there are many, many chemicals that are problematic in high concentrations and very safe in low concentrations. As extreme examples, water and sodium chloride will both kill you if taken in excess. Chlorine at ~4 ppm in tap water is a bit stinky but won’t hurt you even after a lifetime of exposure. And Chlorine at ~3 ppm in a swimming pool with an appropriate level of cyanuric acid added is barely perceptible.

- There aren’t credible alternatives. We can chlorinate our water, or we can add monochloramine, or we could let pathogens grow in our municipal plumbing. The latter will sicken people on a large scale.


> There aren’t credible alternatives.

Other countries (e.g. Germany) do not routinely chlorinate their drinking water and seem to do fine.


After a bit of reading, it seems that this is mainly achieved by having a much newer and better maintained water distribution system. It would be great to have that in the USA.


The local US army bases in Germany actually chlorinate their perfectly fine tap water. What a waste!

But it is probably the perception of unchlorinated water as not safe, and you will probably have a similar problem in the US itself if you switched the water system..


>"Chlorine in water is not actually a meaningful problem."

There's the crux of the argument define "meaningful", because I think that is what everyone is arguing over in regards to asbestos.

There are no levels of radioactive alpha particles that are safe to ingest (surface contact, they can apparently be washed off), yet in Desert Storm our troops stomped right through the stuff regularly with no warning or protections. Go look up photos of troops near/on destroyed Iraqi tanks, the white powder is depleted uranium rounds. The wind blows it into the air and the troops breathed that stuff in.

Cancer in Iraqi civilians skyrocketed after that war, and US troops got the mysterious "gulf war syndrome"... (but no one official knows where that came from...) Do you think the Army/government didn't know the area was radioactively polluted?

While I don't have the chemistry degree to argue with you about the dangers of chlorine, my dad (who is a chemist) can. He won't put chlorine in his pool, he uses a bromide of some kind.

Also, there are tons of other toxins dumped into our food supply, including additives to the containers that don't need to be reported as ingredients, but are in the food none the less.

While I don't disagree that pathogens need to be killed in the pipes, and chlorine works pretty well for that, this isn't proof that it's safe to ingest. And considering the massive quantities in many peoples lives, comparing it on a minute level is disingenuous, as it's not just 4ppm if you encounter all day long, it can be dramatically higher than that.

And if anyone doesn't know, chlorine gas, a similar gas to mustard gas (used to kill many in World War 1) can be made by accidentally combining chlorine and another common house cleaner. And these people didn't die right away, in fact most didn't. The effects were longer term.

So to claim since there are no immediate health effects from exposure to chlorine is to dismiss the long term affects, of which, who knows what they are? Seems odd this isn't common knowledge since we know so much about asbestos which somehow one tiny speck of it will give you cancer?

I am not foolish enough to test if asbestos is dangerous, but the sheer willingness to ignore common sense and trust "ppm" and "safe in low concentrations" is likely why we have so much cancer and other diseases these days.


Well, for one, there isn't any chlorine in my water. None. 0.

The last time we had chlorine in the water was after a farmer overfertilized and the ancient water system took on some pathogens. After cleaning out the pipes the water system was chlorinated lightly for a week.

Low doses of chlorine aren't deadly, there is such a thing as a LD50 for chlorine.

In low doses, chlorine and asbestos aren't harmful in a significant manner but it should be added that chlorine has much more direct effects than asbestos and asbestos to my knowledge has much lower limits at which prolonged exposure will cause negative medical effects.

Asbestos in nature is not different to background radiation. The obvious conclusion isn't "radiation isn't harmful" or "getting hit with a car is more dangerous than radiation".


Does persistent low-level exposure to chlorine cause health problems?


That's a good question, does it? I know that there was a time when not a single doctor in the world believed there was such a thing as latex allergy.

My family is in the chemical business and my father (chemist) won't put chlorine in his pool, he uses a bromide of some kind.

But, if something is popular (asbestos was at one point) it must be just fine.


This is argument based on a counter-factual though. Chlorine as used for keeping our water supply safe does appear to be warranted (i.e. the benefits outweigh the costs), whereas the use of asbestos is the other way around; the health effects clearly outweigh the benefits. Public policy should be based around what we know, not what you wish to be true but isn't.


>"...the benefits outweigh the costs.."

I agree with this sentiment, but it seems the costs are only considered after public outcry, not from scientific understanding or economics. It's often cheaper to let people get hurt.


If something is popular, problems tend to become apparent. It can be an unknown with a new chemical, but for something like chlorine which has had massive public exposure for a very long time, it’s fairly safe to say that it doesn’t have much in the way of negative effects at low levels of exposure.


What about cigarettes, lead pipes, lead paint? There's quite a few chemicals/toxins that were in use for thousands of years before any did anything about them. Even something as simple as hygiene is new to doctors as of the 18th century.


You can’t look before the modern era, as the tools and techniques for discovering this sort of long-term damage didn’t exist.

Are there any examples of things that were in pervasive use around, say, 1970 but didn’t get recognized as dangerous until recently? I think there are examples in nutrition, but I don’t know about environmental toxins.


Every era is the modern era, until it isn't anymore.

Are you claiming that people could spend decades counting the average movement of the moon around the earth, accurate to the fraction of a second, thousands of years ago, but couldn't understand long term health effects until just recently?


I'm pretty sure you know that I was referring to the period of time from a couple hundred years ago until now, 2018, when I said "the modern era." Let's not delve into semantic fuckery.

And yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Figuring out the motion of the moon can be done by a single person using nothing but dedicated observation and arithmetic. Figuring out the public health effects of chronic low-level exposure to toxins requires statistical techniques and data-gathering infrastructure that didn't exist until at least the 18th century, and wasn't commonly applied until the 20th century.

The concept of long-term health effects due to exposure to stuff has been around forever, but the ability to conclusively prove it is a lot more recent.


Both of the following statements statements are true:

> there is no level of [asbestos] exposure below which clinical effects do not occur

> in general, people who become ill from inhaling asbestos have been regularly exposed in a job where they worked directly with the material

If minimal exposure causes small effects, and maximal exposure - loose, lots of it, long periods of time - causes huge effects, you would expect the people who interact with it most to show the most severe symptoms. That does not mean the small effects are not present, only that they're smaller than the large effects.

For an analogy, poking people with a penknife is not a healthy activity. Just because most people who die from or who go to the hospital for knife wounds were stabbed with larger knives does not mean we should promote poking people with small knives, and suggest that knife wounds are only bad if you're stabbed with large fixed-blade knives many times. Being worst in the latter case does not mean that they're benign in the former case. A headline that law enforcement are now allowing people to stab each other with small knives would be ridiculous.


On reading sibling comments, I note that there's an important counter-analogy which I neglected to mention: Many things do have minimum exposure levels below which they are safe. Various medicines, for example - an appropriate dose is good for you, overdosing will kill you.


In the same wikipedia article

>A history of asbestos exposure at work is reported in about 70 percent to 80 percent of all cases.

This means in 20 to 30 percent of all cases, health effects occur in subjects who do not have periodic exposure to asbestos at work. 20 to 30 percent is not negligible.


My father, a Systems Analyst, had the misfortune to spend 18 months in the late sixties working on a site where a new Air-Conditioning system was being installed and lagged with Chrysotile (White Asbestos.) Thirteen years later he was dead due to mesothelioma.

His "regular job" did not involve working directly with the material and Asbestos continues to kill hundreds of pople each year who do not directly work with this material. https://www.teachers.org.uk/edufacts/asbestos


Edit: ya know people, you could respond to the specific claims instead of pressing the "I disagree" button.

I pressed the "made a reasonable argument, even if I disagree, and backed it up with some sources" button. More folks would do well to choose that one more often over other choices.


Because your arguments are ridiculous, and you are referencing directly to material that points out very clearly that exposure to asbestos carries a risk of health hazard, for the people exposed.

"In general" people who become ill from inhaling asbestos have been regularly exposed in a job where they worked directly with the material ???

If there is even the risk that a single person could fall ill because of unintentional exposure, then it should be ground enough for a blanket ban.

It's like saying that smoking should be allowed again in public places, since "in general", people that get cancer are first-hand smokers.


Are you here on some kind of political mission? You're not making scientific claims, you're picking single sentences out from a context that backs up the actual scientific claims made the by the actual scientific paper posted by the person you're replying to. Why pretend that we can't click on the same wikipedia link as you and read the paragraphs surrounding the quoted and impressively vague "However, in general..." sentence.

At least, I gotta thank you for pointing out a needlessly vague an slanted statement in wikipedia. It should be removed or amended with the figures that follow elsewhere.


> Are you here on some kind of political mission?

No, I'm just annoyed that people seem to treat a statement of fact, that asbestos in your floor tiles or walls is a grave risk to people who don't work around it all day is so controversial.

> Why pretend that we can't click on the same wikipedia link as you and read the paragraphs surrounding the quoted and impressively vague "However, in general..." sentence.

Did you click on it though? Because you would've seen this immediately after:

> A paper published in 1998, in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, concurs, and comments that asbestosis has been reported primarily in asbestos workers, and appears to require long-term exposure, high concentration for the development of the clinical disease.

Which again, supports my original statement.


“Primarily” and “generally” means 70-80% here, based on the actual figures, not 99.5% which is what it sounds like you want people to think. That’s a huge amount of people affected not working in construction.


People are downvoting because they believe what they've been told for decades from the media and late night lawyers commercials but this is the scientific fact. Non-friable asbestos is not dangerous, and people who don't work with it on a constant basis are not at risk. Those people who work with asbestos over longer periods of time are the ones who are at risk. A handful of exposures to friable asbestos will not give you lung cancer.

This is the same belief/religion with high salt or high fat diets. People have grown up for so long with those beliefs because we have been indoctrinated that when new science comes up that disproves the above, they disbelieve the science.


>A handful of exposures to friable asbestos will not give you lung cancer

Simply not a claim you can make. The incidence may be very low, but it has been proven that asbestos fibers are directly responsible for the creation of cancerous mesothelioma cells. Any number of fibers in your lungs 'may' cause cancer, even one.


> it has been proven that asbestos fibers are directly responsible for the creation of cancerous mesothelioma cells.

This is also a claim you simply cannot make.

Every chemical has a toxicity level. A single x-ray could give you lung cancer if you're unlucky. Just because there's a claim floating around that a single fiber could cause cancer is meaningless. Was this in a test tube or a lab environment?

Every day, millions of your own body cells are developing cancer because the DNA is being misreplicated during mitosis. But you have structures in your body that fight against this cancer and destroy those cells. You're saying, without any evidence, that your body can't fight a few microscopic fibers? Remember, any number of x-rays, including dental x-rays, could also cause cancer but you don't see people banning x-rays.


Radiation has known degrees of safety. https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_tab...

>There is no "safe" level of asbestos exposure for any type of asbestos fiber. https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/asbestos/


Chemicals can have levels of dilution, where below a certain level it ceases to be a threat. Diluted in air, or in liquids.

You cant dilute a fibre....

This is also the same reason why nanoparticles are such a threat.


They're not made of chemicals?




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