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.