If you ignore the health effects, asbestos is a fucking brilliant material, strong(if used with a binder) exceptionally fireproof, UV stable and fairly inert.
Why _wouldn't_ you use it? To use modern parlance; only melts wouldn't use it, thats who (this message brought to you by your friendly corporate sponsor...)
The problem is that it still kills now[1]. Because its a time bomb, with a dwell time of well over 10-20 years, its very lard to pin point the cause.
The only way that its _stopped_ being put into building materials is through regulation. The problem now for us, especailly in the UK is the power of regulation is being ablated through incompetence, funding cuts and a concerted effort by those who stand to benefit from a weakened regulatory system.
Most regulation is formed from the blood of victims. We may not _like_ what the regulation is, and lord knows it needs improving. But to not have it, or worst, have it and not be enforced, is a terrible state of affairs.
[1]https://neu.org.uk/latest/library/what-real-risk-asbestos-sc...
In reality, only personal and group morality protected our society from such forces, and letting ethics retard profit and growth became seriously uncool in the 80s hippie backlash.
In addition to buildings, e.g. ships. Think about a steamship, what material that is fireproof and doesn't rot do you think they used for insulating boilers and steam pipes? One museum ship I'm somewhat familiar with ripped out all the asbestos insulation and replaced it with IIRC mostly mineral or glass wool during a major renovation some years back, just to make it safer for the mostly volunteers who dedicate their time to keep the ship functioning.
Of course you wouldn't.
We have journalists to uncover dangers like this; they are clearly financially incentivised to do so. We have courts to assess damages. We don't need government regulation.
Such a common trope that "the heartless capitalist doesn't care about harming customers so we need the government to save us". Of course the capitalist cares about harming customers, she needs to sell to them (and their competitors product will be much more successful if it is not harmful!).
And, in either case, regulation or free market will only save us if there are viable alternatives. Fossil fuels still kill people, but we don't regulate against it because there is currently no viable alternative.
Manufacturers are successuful when they sell. If their product is found dangerous they a) deny and muddy the waters, b) settle lawsuits and if that doesn't work c) close up shop and open a new business. Customer unwelfare is a cost of business.
Equally, once it has been established that Asbestos is harmful any company using it would be so sued that they would quickly cease to exist.
Yes the free market doesn't stop health risks immediately but neither does regulation (see: asbestos!)
Both have pros and cons
Regulation sucks at directing productions of goods and setting prices, distributing these tasks to the people generally works better.
The free market is unstable though, its actors ever trying to gain advantage and squash competition. Profit first driven people too often push harm to humans as out of mind and externalized.
This is where regulation is needed. (read as: we the people need rules to protect what we deem important, including our health and having a well-functioning society, profits be damned)
So false.
And, as others have pointed out, this is not an individual choice. The families who got asbestosis from washing their fathers work clothes didnt make a choice. The bloom of cancers for residential suburbs miles around james hardy in camellia didnt have a choice. There is no expiration date on the dangers of friable asbestos. It remains hidden in the common environment forever, until someone else stumbles on it.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsona...
Internal memos from 1970s - 2000s reveal knowledge of asbestos traces. Executives, better known as caring capitalists, resisted disclosure.
In case you think this isn’t a pattern: Purdue and Oxy, General Motors and their ignitions switches, DuPont and “confirmed animal carcinogen” Teflon, Philip Morris’ cigarette campaigns, VWs dieselgate…
Each of them found to be suppressing knowledge knowingly harming consumers.
When it is widely known (and therefore can be regulated) it is already too late as it's now in the producers interest to cease producing it.
Heavy litigation after the fact can disincentivise the lying in the first place. If legislation doesn't not allow for this (e.g. because of time limitations) then it should be amended.
Completely unregulated markets simply don't scale in terms of successful trading - the regulation replaces the work each buyer would have to do and thus is actually more efficient than having each buyer replicate the work of the regulator. This is why they have been out-competed by regulated markets in the course of history.
Regulated venues dominate nearly every sphere of trading in terms of volume.
They have done this by being more attractive to buyers and sellers than unregulated venues - i.e. regulated venues have out-competed unregulated venues.
In the market for trading venues, regulated venues have won.
ULEZ, Euro 6, clean air act (both US and UK), there are more though.
No doubt when electric cars become better in every way than fossil fuel cars, the government will create a regulation banning fossil fuel cars. Everyone will rejoice that the government stopped those horrible fossil-fuel burning cars! Of course, the vast majority of people would have switched to the electric cars at this point anyway.
I lost my father when I was 30. I thought I’d been lucky because I’d had him through my “adult” life. Now I’m 40 and have a 2-year-old son, and over these past ten years I think it’s when I would have most liked to have him — when more questions came up about what he was really like as a person, beyond his role as a father. He died at 72 from lung cancer; he had been smoking since he was 13 and never went to the doctor. I guess I was lucky after all…
The thing I'm a little sad about is that I'm unlikely to be there for too long when my kids have kids.
We had our first child at ~30, so we track this trend, too. However, I sometimes think, what if we gave in to the biological trend and[0] had kids at 18-20? If that were the common trend, then... by the time i got 36, my kids would be on their way to starting their own families. I.e. my child-rearing day would've been over, right here, today. As it is, I'm about to turn 37, and am looking forward to some 15 more years of parenting.
No, I really am looking forward to this. But the point is, the life after parenting doesn't sound so appealing anymore, not when it starts at 50 instead of 36.
--
[0] - Subject to the typical rules about age of adulthood, to not overcomplicate this.
Even if you have kids at 18 you won’t be done with parenting at 36. Maybe they leave the home, maybe not, you will still have to do a lot of parenting for a while more. You’ll be well in your 40s before you can even think “I’m finally mostly done”.
At that age it depends on each person what they want to do with the life. A lot of my friends who had kids really early started focusing on career later in life. Exactly what they “missed”. Those who focused on career and travel when young, focused on kids later in life. I haven’t heard anyone really regretting the choice beyond “my back can’t really take it anymore”[0] because you can never know what you’re missing. You’ll never know how your life would have been otherwise and what you would have liked more or less.
[0] Me, after starting parenthood in my 40s and being lazy so my back isn’t what it could be.
My wife's mother had her when she was 20. She's still around, got to see her grandchildren reach adulthood, and have a long relationship with her daughter as an adult.
Part of this might be that 40s life is a bit more chill anyhow - I no longer go and get smashed every weekend, or even have the FOMO that I’m not doing that. And work life, whilst more junior, was ultimately more extreme in my 20s and 30s. So any physical drop is probably balanced by a slight drop in general burning the candle at both ends. But yeah, don’t think 40s parenting is a no go. Go for it!
I think there are advantages either way. I have three kids, born when I was 35-41; when my wife was 31-37. The children met great-grandparents, get lots of experience with their grandparents, and I think time for us to get more established has made for a stronger and more interesting parenting environment. I might've regretted giving up chances to travel/etc before having kids. That said, I am conscious that I would be 80+ before my youngest hit 40.
It might be that consecutive generations of late-parenting are where the impact is felt. My parents had their three children at 24-29.
On the other hand here I am today living half way around the world from where I was born, so maybe this urge to expand outward is some sort of genetic thing. Could explain a lot about humanity - Africa was pretty much a utopia especially relative to the damnable freezing wastelands the 'Northern Lands.' Gotta be something a bit wrong with some of us! Hey who's up for going to Mars? I am!
This [1] is RFK Jr at friggin 71 years old, amongst other athletic feats you can find videos of. He's on testosterone replacement therapy, but on the other hand I don't think that's really some big asterisk. Testosterone is absolutely critical for men and it declines as we age. When I reach the point where my testosterone has meaningfully diminished, I'll also likely do the same. And TRT alone doesn't give you results like that - that's the result of endless dedication to maintaining your health and fitness.
He's an eccentric man in a hyper-polarized world yet has raised 6 children that, at least publicly, have remained neutral to supportive of him. He's gotta be doing a lot right there IMO. And having a 70 year old father that's still in phenomenal shape and health is something our GP would certainly have liked to have had.
Why? Nobody knows. So the answer is most likely that we're doing what we've endlessly done countless times dating back to at least the era of the Roman Empire, and are accidentally poisoning ourselves with something (or some things) that we are convinced is completely safe. I'm not saying that Kennedy is right, but I am saying that "we" are wrong. And so walking down a different path on occasion is not only okay, but a very good idea.
[1] - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...
I'll be encouraging my children to have children as early as reasonably possible. In part it's because of greed - I want to see those grandkids, and maybe even remotely possibly great grandkids before I die, but it's also because it's what I wish I had done in hindsight. Having children has not only been the joy and pride of my life, but it also gave my life much more meaning and direction. In any case, I also think it's completely appropriate for grandparents to play a significant role in the raising of children.
I have some extended family who had some unexpected kids around that 18 age and I firmly disagree that it’s better. We had so many more advantages by having kids when older, from better emotional regulation to better time management practices.
I had kids when older than you. Although some of the early years being up late weren’t easy, it also wasn’t devastatingly tiresome. My wife and I split duties and staggered our schedules.
The low sleep years were also over very quickly. It’s not like you’re up all night with kids until they’re 10 years old. Optimizing the entirety of raising kids based on being as young as possible to stay up late during the first year of life isn’t a good idea, IMO. You have to look at the big picture.
I’m sorry you’re struggling and I don’t mean to downplay your personal struggles, but at the same time I have to agree with other comments that are puzzled at someone in their 20s being so crushingly tired when parents in their 30s routinely handle child raising. If you have some unmentioned condition then I don’t mean to belittle that, but I don’t want others reading these comments to assume your description is typical.
For some families the women start having children at eighten, and it is the business of the extended family to provide the "better emotional regulation to better time management practices"
Other families have different arrangements and the women and men are far more on their own
There are advantages and disadvantages to both ways of doing things
I lost my Dad when I was 27, he had just turned 60. Also lung cancer, also smoking since a child, also had never visited the doctor.
In the 5 years since then, I've met the love of my life, gotten engaged, and planning a family. All of this without my Dad, without his advice, without his support. It hurts, a lot. Whenever big moments in my life happen, my first instinct is always to give him a call.
I miss what could've been.
It still cuts me up to think about how my kids have never known my dad, and their grandad.
I’m lucky to have him still at the age of 30 but it’s clear how traumatic losing a parent young is.
Leaving your kids better off.
> Real wages averaged $67,521 in 2022, and average household incomes averaged to $87,864.
Further down it says:
> In every country, there are levels of the middle class, with low middle-class earners and high middle-class earners. In America, the states all have their own middle-class medians as well. For example, in Alabama, low-middle-class families start at $38,582 while higher middle-class ranges can end at $161,524.
So without knowing where you're from, we don't know.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-fam...
https://www.reddit.com/r/DIYUK/comments/133jq4r/the_is_this_...
My own house probably contains some Asbestos, but getting an asbestos survey is very expensive, prohibitively so for people earning the average salary. Not to mention if asbestos is found, it is a further expense to get it removed and cleaned up. The best I can do is send a sample in for testing if I find something risky while renovating myself. Most contractors up here do no care at all if something looks like it may be ACM.
The best thing we can do for people is to provide balanced guidance on where asbestos may be and how much risk does it pose. AIB like Asbestolux is way more dangerous than Eternit is and depending on the location Eternit can remain in place.
Unfortunately if we were to take a zero tolerance approach it would cause more harm than good. How do people pay for remediation? do we all abandon our homes? what happens to the farmers who cannot move? I have no perfect answer here. Asbestos is a hazard no question, but what can we do other than common sense and balance?
As always, it ends up cheaper to just chuck dangerous materials into the wider environment rather than dealing with them in a responsible manner. It's a shame that we can't retroactively penalise the builders that used so much asbestos.
Zero tolerance means paralysis, it’s a naive ideal. Look at the recent medical technologies where zero tolerance for unwanted side effects has to be balanced with benefits.
What isn’t a trade-off?
History is rife with companies/industries who were well aware of the dangers they were creating to people for decades while actively suppressing the evidence of such that they themselves discovered.
Which companies this applies to for Asbestos in particular, I couldn't tell you, but it would be shocking if there weren't lots of bad actors who knew they were bad actors considering there has been research on the dangers of Asbestos since 1927 -- nearly a full century ago.
Comparison with medical technologies isn't particularly valid as people can choose whether to have that treatment or not, but people can't easily choose whether their house was built with asbestos or not. If a house was already built, then the potential danger is already there and we can either deal with it sensibly or not care about the deadly consequences of releasing it into the environment.
I don't see the logic of not punishing retroactively as companies may have made a lot of profit and then pay nothing towards the clean-up costs - privatise the profit and socialise the costs. The homeowners/tenants are effectively being punished retroactively when they may suspect/discover that their house contains asbestos, so why should the builders (if they are still around) not have to pay?
Maybe there should be extra taxes imposed on industries with a history of environmental abuse to reclaim some of the costs to society.
Fiberglass batts are really bad to handle too, and same with gypsum dust and saw dust from cutting manufactured stone countertops. If you do anything indoors you should definitely wear a respirator and full sleeves.
I feel you're being a bit flippant with the known danger of disturbing asbestos containing materials. The dust and fibres are typically too fine to be controlled by a household vacuum cleaner and will require specialist handling to minimise the risk. Yes, the dust isn't absorbed through the skin, but instead is breathed in and enters the lungs where it causes problems.
You're right about using respirators/masks when dealing with dust, but special care needs to be taken with asbestos dust and not all dust masks will protect your lungs from the dust/fibres.
When we re-did our kitchen we found asbestos-containing glue under a new-ish layer of tiles one of the previous owners of the apartment just laid on top. I wish regulations would already have been stricter back then (and that they would have been followed - another story...) as this surprise find caused massive delays to the construction and forced us to temporarily move out during the removal and decontamination.
One of the best ways to make DIY-ing in buildings built before 1994 (when asbestos was banned for construction in Germany) safe has been to buy a H-filtration class shop vac. It can filter out asbestos fibers and many other fine dust particles that aren't healthy to inhale and was barely more expensive than a comparably good vac.
Yes, that is why when you test positive for asbestos you add a little "a" sticker to the material to notify anyone in the future.
I think you are missing the point. Many people like myself want to take care of it, and would hire a proper crew to take care of it, but we are not wealthy enough to just call in a crew without some financial planning. This is not just an annoying expense, quite a bit more than that.
It is not the builders fault, they did not know, but the manufacturers of ACM did for decades! and they were penalized. Most were forced to set up trusts to cover certain expenses in the US, but I am not sure what their scope is.
Maybe in Norway you need to tell people to chill over it. But the current attitude to asbestos in DIY spaces in the US/UK is far away from that, and a lot closer to “yea go on just tear it out yourself, you’ll be fine if you put on an n95 and spray some water first”.
Nope, same attitude here.
Thinking before swinging your drill will get most people safe enough not to worry about it.
Low exposures of both things are statistically less likely to hurt you than large doses. We pick a line to call "safe", but completely safety in either case is not guaranteed.
> More than 1,000 tons of asbestos are thought to have been released into the air following the buildings' destruction.
It's hardly the stupidest thing British people have voted for in the last two decades, probably not even in the top 5.
However, I don't doubt that a lot of the UK would vote for such a law as most people have a knee-jerk reaction to "won't anyone think of the children?".
How *could* we have resisted? What were our options?
As for the many, many things which could have worked in your opinion, people have been resisting the introduction of such laws for years. A common, and correct, refrain on HN is that the people resisting have to win every battle; the people trying to introduce such legislation only need to win one.
To some extent this is true I suppose, but these laws are not (yet) irreversible. The people introducing them have to keep winning for them to remain on the books.
They decided to withdraw from the UK market as the ICO (not OFCOM, who handle OSA) fined them for mishandling the PII of children, not under the OSA, but under UK’s Children’s Code[1] which is part of the DPA (UK implementation of GDPR into law)
How many is plenty and what are the sources to back this?
Asbestos is not kryptonite. One time exposure is not going to have short term or long term impact to your health.
There is a lot of FUD around asbestos, check out all of the panicked posts on reddit.
The cancer causing mechanism of asbestos is mechanical. A single strand in the wrong place could cut your DNA up. With any probabilistic process the more exposure the more chances and the greater the likelihood.
I’ve also just posted his great article on British Summer Time, I would have that would have been more popular;
Now, asbestosis is more common in long term exposure so it might be fine, but not bothering to tell me to wear a respirator and the ignorance after I brought it up years later makes me disgusted. So now I have to wonder whether decades later I'll have complications without clear ways to address them.
1. driving nails into it won't release as many particles as cutting or similar activities would
2. the fact that there's a flexible sheet on top of the asbestos one means that the only exposure would typically be through the created hole through which the nail is being driven, or the sides of the sheet, so it should be sealed off enough anyways
3. since the activity took place in fresh air instead of indoors, the wind (even though there wasn't much of it) should take care of any particles that are left
I try to recognize when I realize I'm doing it, stop, apologize for the deception that it is, and commit to more sincere communication.
Alternatively, regularly informing your family of each infinitesimal danger in this world is a path to neurosis or estrangement. There is a balance, and in some cases non-disclosure does feel the right path (to me).
"In South Africa" is not very specific.
it seems to have been firstly in this remote in the remote Northern Cape where "The mine eventually became the largest crocidolite mine in the world" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koegas_mine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos_Mountains
It predictably wasn't consequence-free at that end either, see the later parts of article. And many other sources, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2001/sep/15/weekend...
Apparently South Africa was the world's second-largest market-economy producer of asbestos from the 1950s to the 1980s and the largest producer of amosite and crocidolite (I had to google those and it appears among asbestos there are a few different types/lengths of fibers).
The big mines all closed around 1992/98, with a complete cessation of all asbestos mining in 2002/3. I found this scanned document from the University of Cape Town that goes into detail on the discovery, mining and a few epidemics as they called them: https://vula.uct.ac.za/access/content/group/9c29ba04-b1ee-49...
The numbers are crazy, for example in 1931 mill workers (in a sample of 100) only 14% had more than 5 years of service (the single longest having been there for 9 years). "Yet every worker experienced a cough productive of mucoid sputum, 72% suffered dyspnea on exertion and 47% reported loss of weight".
In less than 1 year 36% showed early signs, 9% advanced signs, 45% any abnormal sign. In 3 years that went up to 55%, 24% and 79% respectively; and by 5-9 years 36%, 64% and 100%.
Attempts to reopen the mine and sell asbestos to the developing world under a new brand caught the attention of the Daily Show leading to some train wreck coverage that ultimately led to them changing the name of the town.
Russia still extensively uses Abestos, the name literally comes from the Russian town of Asbest which is known for exporting, you guessed it, asbestos, to countries like China, India, and Brazil. Of course being Russian they also say it's a Western lie that Asbestos causes lung issues. (I shouldn't have to say this but I'm noting this, and not advocating it's true, asbestos is serious business and I wouldn't want to live in a building with it, it's just interesting that BRICS nations still use it).
So yes, it's dangerous. But it's very cheap, and poverty is far more dangerous than asbestos. It's simply a fact: residents of most countries simply can't afford a 200k dollars asbestos-free house, like Americans or Europeans can.
If Americans had less affordable homes like the rest of the world have, they would still be building them out of asbestos.
https://aiobs.org/how-healthy-and-costly-are-the-most-used-i... shows insulation cost for a (typical?) 1500sqft (~140m^2 for the rest of the world) home. The most common, and also the cheapest, type of insulation being fiberglass bats at $560. So if this home would cost $200k, that's 3% of the total price. So even if asbestos would be free, it would barely move the needle in total cost.
Edit: That $560 looks suspiciously low. Googling around some more shows an insulation (incl. installation) cost for a "typical" home at around $3500-$4500. In any case, a small fraction of the total cost of a house project.
https://www.owenscorning.com/en-us/insulation/pink-next-gen-...
Sure it's not good for you, so using PPE is certainly warranted, but it's on a whole different level of badness compared to asbestos.
[1] Per wikipedia, there are some varieties of mineral wool used for high temperatures (think insulating industrial furnaces and such) which are carcinogens.
Seems incorrect.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/asbestos
Etymology
From Old French abestos, from Latin asbestos, itself from Ancient Greek ἄσβεστος (ásbestos, “unquenchable, inextinguishable”), from ᾰ̓- (ă-, “not”) + σβέννῡμῐ (sbénnūmĭ, “I quench, quell”).
Named for the silver salt found there.
But if roofing material is exposed in your room you're doing something wrong. Also legal limit for asbest dust in air also apply to asbest used in "шифер" (according to wikipedia)
What that Russian city is alone is in ignoring safety requirements and mining it like people did in the 90s.
https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?tab=all&SearchText=asbe...
I have not tried, although I was tempted just out of curiosity -- would it make it through customs and get delivered to me in the US ? The rope and fabric style products should not be that dangerous because they are long fibers that should not break off and float in the air, and the cylinder head gasket material is probably chopped short fibers but it's embedded in a matrix of other stuff.
We probably over regulate the long fiber stuff. The short felt-like fibers we used to mix into plaster, cement, anything needing strength and texture, are probably correctly banned; the risk to reward seems not worth it. Many of those products could use glass fiber just as well.
However, I think the general experience of people exposed to rock or cement dust, basically anything silica based that gets into the lungs, is that is really bad. Handling short chopped mineral fiber of any type seems like something that has to have a huge payoff, like part of a rocket for satillite launches, to be worth it.
This is good to keep in mind because there are some really interesting alternative mineral fiber products out there. Basalt fiber in particular, is sold in a chopped mix for adding to concrete, seems potentially bad. There are some interesting ceramic fibers available too.
https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?tab=all&SearchText=basa...
https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?tab=all&SearchText=cera...
The other way around, since it's pretty much the reason the town exists, they named it after asbestos.
It's not too unusual in the largest country in the world rich with mineral deposits. Other names might be Slantsy (oil shales), Apatity (apatites) and of course, Nikel
Well, as I gather from information all over, the only danger is if you start to mess with it, like cutting, breaking and such. As then you put the nasty dust airborne.
Have a read about Wittenoom in Western Australia. It was a town on the outskirts of a blue asbestos mine, it's absolutely tragic what went on there, kids would be playing in mounds of blue asbestos, many of them tragically died.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittenoom,_Western_Australia
Here’s to workers rights and living longer.
Especially back then, the local economy was heavily dependent on Dow Chemical, who has a massive facility in the area. My grandfather worked there. He was one of the first people to ever handle Saran wrap. He also recalls hilarious stories, like a time when someone pranked the foreman by dumping some stuff in the soap dispenser that turned into a sticky, snotty goo when exposed to water. He also worked in an area that used lots of iodine for a couple years. His whole body was sunflower yellow when he came home from work, but he says he never got a cold!
Some stories are more harrowing. There were air raid sirens to warn people when Dow was venting something into the atmosphere. If you heard the sirens, you went inside ASAP.
And then there was the dioxin plant (aka agent orange). He says men in their 40s who worked in the dioxin plant looked like they were in their 80s. Many hard-working people died young there.
Luckily, he was never in the Dioxin plant on a daily basis - he was a diesel mechanic and a welder. Had he been in the dioxin plant, he probably wouldn't be alive today to share those stories. I fear that, as this generation leaves us, so will the cautionary tales.
https://www.michiganlcv.org/case/no-compensation-victims-tox...
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/midwest/2023/01/30/705...
Cautionary tales that are not being learned where the similarly dreadful silicosis is concerned; there is an incredible increase in the number of cases of silicosis among kitchen fitters working on granite worktops.
(I fear we may also find this issue among people working near 3D printers using glass and carbon-fibre-filled filaments.)
1) I’ve noticed the James Hardie ‘brand’ being used openly a lot in the past 5 years. I guess the stigma from their evil handling of asbestosis claims is gone.
2) In the installation manual it had an extensive list of things you have to do to not get silicosis.
No thanks Satan, regular pine weatherboards for me!
We were impressed by Dow Gardens. I'm also particularly interested Alden B. Dow's architecture. I'm hoping to attend one of the various tours the studio offers next year.
I happened to see an article[0] about a Dow house coming up for sale last year. That ignited my interest in that area of the state. (I'm not a credible enough potential buyer to actually see this property in the flesh, sadly.)
Some of my family lived in the Traverse City area and we still have property there. We spend time there every summer and, coming from western Ohio, we always take a westerly route to get up there. I'd never spent any time on the eastern side of the peninsula before. We're definitely going back for another couple days sometime.
[0] https://www.mlive.com/realestate-news/2024/08/see-inside-an-...
There are still pockets of this. In the big US Navy shipyards, the exotic metals welders are not known for living very long.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/947016
https://www.ourmidland.com/lifestyles/article/Throwback-Dow-...
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/04/02/archives/50-pickets-at-do...
I've wondered for a long time (based entirely on anecdotal observations) whether some forms of cancer and other illnesses arise more quickly from sudden shifts in daily habit. Sometimes it actually does seem to me like the episode in the Simpsons where Mr. Burns thinks he is invincible.
The idea of an impact to the body that significantly disrupts the ability to keep it in homeostasis has intrigued me. It’s likely meaningless and my observations are anecdotal, but I keep my eye out for research on it.
If I have something really important going on, I basically don't get sick, when I finally kick my feet up, I just seem to get hammered with a bad cold or flu.
I also think it's interesting how my body seems to understand when I can't poop, like if I'm in a train or something without a toilet and just doesn't seem to bother until I tell it it's ok.
My suspicion here is that a lot of your grandfather's colleagues "felt the need it was time to slow down and enjoy life" could actually have been the beginning stages of some chronic illness. But that's just a guess.
Wrt to retirement, it's probably more due to cancer rates in general shooting up in people of retirement age. The body gets less adept at dealing with crap that eventually develops into cancer.
Maybe something related is going on when you quit working with something like asbestos, and once you "settle down", your body is no longer under constant attack, so cancers happen ?
The only possible hazard she had - she worked for 15 years near busy road, where there was a lot of diesel/gas engine exhaust, but I doubt this is related to her pancreatic cancer, as I found normally this affects lungs/respiratory paths. Maybe she was exposed to some agricultural chemicals in her childhood, because she was living near agricultural fields in the Soviet Union, but I doubt she was significantly exposed to it.
I even joked with her that she was living probably the most cancer-cautious life, and still got cancer. So the worst thing for her is that nobody could tell what she did incorrectly to get this illness. It felt very unfair for her.
My mother died of an unusual form of it, just a little older than yours, when I was in my early twenties. It was terrible.
The only unusual thing was some prior surgery near her pancreas, from twenty years earlier, had apparently had severe scarring that was noticed during surgery to fit a stent.
In reality I was still dealing with it ten, fifteen years later. Because pre-death grief and post-death grief are different things.
This only really came home to me three and a half years ago when my (elderly) father died after years of moderate dementia; this hit me so hard and continues to weigh on me, and I realised I'd tried to avoid grief when my mother died. I miss my father in a way I never allowed myself to miss my mother, and he had the good long life.
Grief is there whether you want to acknowledge it or not.
Depending where she lived, this may have been the cause.
Plenty of people unknowingly live and grow food in areas that had toxic waste dumped on them a century ago, and it's still there in the dirt.
GMO food, in addition to not being any worse for you than non-GMO food, generally gets grown in places that have always been agricultural land.
Living in New Zealand they are often the most polluted.
Agri industry is, and was always, very lax about disposing of the extremely toxic chemicals in use
Ag pollution is usually things like herbicide, pesticide, and fertilizer, which can have disastrous effects downstream if it washes into a river, but don't make things grown on that land poisonous as long as you rinse off anything that has been sprayed on them.
This is in contrast to, say, reclaiming farmland in an area that had a textile dye factory upstream.
There are certainly exceptions, for example many old orchards used lead arsenate as a pesticide, contaminating the soil with both lead and arsenic.
Turns out she was correct, its since been found in loads of mulch around Sydney.
We also came across a huge pile of it illegally dumped a bunch of years ago in the sand dunes at Kurnell beach, kids were happily playing in it.
They would be fabulous, many of them for repurpossing, but because asbestos it is financially impossible to do anything with them.
So they rot. Some burn, which I imagine releases the asbestos into the atmosphere
It is such a waste
The day I moved into the college dorms he looked at me and said "Don't move the floor tiles, ceilings tiles or the touch the large ventilation pipe outside my door in the hallway." A lot of the buildings at my university were built with asbestos, so much so that the university had a 30 year contract with the lab he worked at to analyze samples.
And it isn't only historical buildings that have asbestos. A very well known mall that was built in the 2000s had incurred some severe hail damage and while the repairs were ongoing samples were taken and found to be hot. Someone had introduced asbestos contaminated materials into the original build and rather than extensive repairs the mall had to do extensive remediation first, before continuing repairs.
Apparently there is still a large stock of "hot" building material that are sitting in warehouses and every once in a while they make it into the supply chain.
I wonder how much of this is because folks in the supply chain might not be aware of what asbestos looks like.
A PLM analyst will use multiple methods to determine if the sample has asbestos, and takes a much longer time.
There are even more expensive tests that can be performed but I'm not so familiar with those.
Not working in the industry, what do they actually do with asbestos that has been removed? I presume it can't be 'destroyed', so it needs to be stored indefinitely somewhere where it doesn't cause harm? Dump it in an unused mine shaft and seal the entrance?
Chemically it's just silicates. So you can melt it at high temperatures or do various other processes to get rid of it.
I'm not sure what they actually do.
No, they did know. Already in the 19th century it was discovered an high rate of mortality amongst asbestos workers.
In France, 1893, we had the first laws about factory dusts levels.
1906, everyone knew.
Here is a rough translation of a France sénat Report :
> It was in 1906 that the first cases of fibrosis were discovered among spinning mill workers.
> The 1906 Labor Inspection Bulletin published a document entitled "Note on the Hygiene and Safety of Workers in Asbestos Spinning and Weaving Mills," by Mr. Auribault, departmental labor inspector in Caen 11 ( * ).
> Denis Auribault noted: "In 1890, an asbestos spinning and weaving factory was established near Condé-sur-Noireau (Calvados). During the first five years of operation, there was no artificial ventilation to directly evacuate the siliceous dust produced by the various looms; this total failure to comply with hygiene rules 12 ( * ) resulted in numerous deaths among the staff: around fifty workers died during the aforementioned period."
> Thus, as early as 1906, the link between exposure to asbestos fibres and the occurrence of occupational deaths was clearly established.
https://www.senat.fr/rap/r05-037-1/r05-037-1_mono.html#toc28
A lot of people ask about stem cell therapy. It’s a hot topic for sure. The hype is kinda huge, but, well, it’s still experimental for lung fibrosis. There’s early research suggesting stem cells might help repair or regenerate some lung tissue, but big lung organizations say be careful—most of what’s out there for sale isn’t proven and can actually be risky if you’re not in a real clinical trial. Like, it’s cool science, but def not ready for prime time (yet).
New stuff is happening too—like targeted immunotherapies and more advanced cellular therapies. There’s a lot of studies in the works, some in mice, some actually moving into people. So, fingers crossed for more breakthroughs soon.
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/news-events-human-drugs/fda-approv... https://stemcellthailand.org/therapies/idiopathic-pulmonary-... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59093-7
I was only wearing a simple mask and was otherwise unprotected.
Since this event, I have developed an excruciating health anxiety/health OCD disorder that focuses around this event. Realistically I do know that while my risk is non zero, it is exceedingly low. But this non zero chance is what is so evil about OCD and this topic. It is debilitating.
At this point, I know way more about asbestos and related diseases than anyone outside the medical and construction industry should know.
There are a thousand things that can increase your risk of cancer by 0.001%. Heart disease kills >20X more people than asbestos related illnesses in the US. Focus on being healthy and happy.
XorNot•3mo ago
If something is radioactive then a Geiger counter will tell you at a distance, it'll even triangulate it.
Asbestos? It can be everywhere and the only way to know is to collect samples, pay $100 a piece to a lab to do phase contrast microscopy and wait.
Then do it again the next time you find something suspicious.
And once you've cleaned it out..well hope your handling was good coz who knows if you got it all - without collecting a lot of samples and testing again.
My house has a few asbestos pieces, and in digging up the yard I've pulled a huge amount of asbestos fiber cement from cheap renovations by previous owners - the stuff was about 10 cm below the surface.
CheeseFromLidl•3mo ago
Aldipower•3mo ago
jabl•3mo ago
That's also one reason why progress in cancer research and drug development is so slow. 'Fix' one cancer, and what you've developed likely has little effect on the zillion other cancer variants.
bregma•3mo ago
jabl•3mo ago
anovikov•3mo ago
CheeseFromLidl•3mo ago
bfkwlfkjf•3mo ago
ortusdux•3mo ago
emmelaich•3mo ago
Not saying you should ignore it but don't dig it up without knowing what you're in for.
bamboozled•3mo ago