If you read Asbestos and Fire by Rachel maines you might think she favors asbestos as a building material for today. But this is not the case she simply is putting the use of asbestos in its historical context. She explains how in the past the risk of dying by fire was much greater than the risk of dying from some other health issues. As I read this book I thought it is also possible that many people would not live long enough to die of asbestos-related diseases. And that context you can understand why asbestos became so popular despite the health risks. I've excerpted a bit from the book below so you can get an idea of the big picture of what this book is all about. If you are not in the asbestos industry this might not interest you at all but for those of us who are knee-deep in it it makes a lot of sense. In other words if you are simply a homeowner in Chicago or in the Chicago suburbs doing research on asbestos for your home this book is probably not going to be very important to you. But still understanding the historical context of asbestos even in a city like Chicago is very important. Here is the excerpt:
Bodies at risk: the Asbestos Controversy
In the decades since the passage of the occupational safety and health act (OSHA) of 1970, asbestos has become a highly visible and controversial legal, scientific, and public health issue, with hundreds of thousands of exposure cases creating a virtual subindustry of torts. Thousands of hours of court time and millions of work hours, not to mention billions of dollars in settlements and judgements, are expaned annually in resolving issues related to asbestos. The rand institute for civil justice report that asbestos ligitation has so far cost businesses about $40 billion, and another $210 billion in costs are possible. The $50 billion coasts of asbestos removal –ang torts resulting from it-also add to the total, as does the $1 trillion in depreciation of asbestos- containing buildings. The burden on the courts is astonishing: by 1989, asbestos cases were 3.52 percent of all civil cases, and 61 percent of all product liability cases in the federal courts. Because the United States is the only industrial democracy in the world without national health insurance, the minority of asbestos plaintiffs who are actually sick have no recourse but litigation to defray the cost of care, thus making us also the only industrial nation that has permitted asbestos disease to become an apparently uncontrollable drain on our own economy as well as that of other nations.
Despite the public attention the controversy has received, there has been surprisingly little discussion of how and why asbestos was introduced into the built environment in the first place or of the risk perception and cost-benefit analysis that resulted in Americans use of an average of five to ten pounds of asbestos per person per year by the 1960’s. None of the major on asbestos risk cites any of theprofessional literature of fire protection; indeed, reading these works, one would not guess that such a literature exist or suppose that the opinion of any community of experts other than health professionals might be relevant to the debate. In an article included in Barry I Castleman and Stephen L. Bergers Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects, Berger, for example argues that alternatives to asbestos insulation have existed since 1890, citing as evidence a list of patents for products of which fewer than 10 percent were ever manufactured or tested. He declines even to mention the obvious necessity of testing materials for their cose compliance or to suggest how any of the supposed substitute might have fared on these tests.
Like nearly all new technologies, asbestos was evaluated between 1870 and 1964-64 against a background of the problems it solved, not of those we were later to learn that created. The negotiation of standards of safety in the united state has historically involved complex interactions among a variety of constituencies, including consumers, government, industry, and the community of experts, which typically include scientists, engineers, and physicians. The latter groups are by nature conservation, assimilating new knowledge slowly over period of years or even generations. The contagion debate of the nineteenth century was just such a controversy.
Perceived risks have been the impetus for the development of many kinds of technology, and it is not unusual for technologies to be developed that successfully reduce the originally perceived risk nut that are ultimately found to be flawed with risk of their own. Infant seats in automobiles are a recent case in point: they save adult lives but endanger small children. In the case of asbestos the perceived risk was fire, an obvious and unmistakable public health hazard. The united states, like all industrial democracies, attempts to base most policies on the principle first articulated by Jeremy Bentham, that of the greatest good for the greatest number. In 1948, of the approximately 10,000 Americans who die from fire every year, almost 40 percent were children-about teh deaths per day of children of elementary school age younger. In 1999 the latest year for which the centers for disease Control (CDC) have published statistics, 2,355 persons died of mesothelioma and 449 of asbestosis none of whom were under the age of fifteen. More children died every year fire. Before we built the fire safety system that includes asbestos, than adults are now dying from asbestos-related disease.
Asbestosis is a respiratory disease caused by inhaling asbestos fibers resulting in scarring of lung tissue, which gradually loses its elasticity. Length and intensity of exposure usually determine the severity of the disease. This is not always the case with mesothelioma, however, a type of cancer that produces tumor on the pleura (lining of the lungs) or the peritoneum (lining of the abdomen); neither length of exposure nor the intensity – the concentration of fibers in the inhaled air – are well correlated with the incidence of the disease, which has even been known to occur in individuals with no history of asbestos exposure. Miners in minerals found in association with asbestos, such as talc can develop both diseases. Latency periods are long, up to thirty years, a characteristic of asbestos disease that has greatly complicated traditional systems of _ workers compensation and other insurance. These programs were designed to cope with immediately obvious injuries and toxic effects, not those that do not manifest for two or three decades. In some states, workers must file claims within a period shorter than the latency period of mesothelioma, resulting in a flood of claims from the so far unimpaired. The number of claims exceeds the annual number of deaths from both diseases by two orders of magnitude.
Asbestos building materials and the system of fire safety of which they were an important component successfully reduced the annual rate of fire deaths in the United States from 9.1 per 100,000 in 1913 to I.O in 1998, during which period asbestos became one of the dominant technologies in structural fire prevention. Only after decades of widespread asbestos use did a new generation of epidemiologists begin to shift the attention of the public and of policymakers from the problems solved by the technology to those it apparently caused. According to William W Lowrance in of acceptable risk, we could not have known the effects of asbestos before a period of long exposure to it.
The framing or context of asbestos risk perception was altered by the apparent removal of the background of fire danger. A, tversky and D. Kahneman have shown that the framing of risk-benefit analysis can completely reverse preferences, even when the mathematically calculated utility of each outcome is identical. Asbestos was evaluated between 1900 and 1964 against a back drop of scenes such as that of the military and civilian bodies found in the ruins of the cocoanut grove nightclub in 1942 and the rows of the children’s bodies in the Chicago morgue after the lady of the angels’ school for 1958. Due in part to the widespread use of asbestos in construction between 1930-1980, large loss of life fires are now very rare, and the technology of asbestos is evaluated today against the backdrop of cases of mesothelioma and asbestos in adults.
Our answer to the policy question “Do we want to use asbestos?” has changed because a new scientific paradigm for asbestos has emerged since 1965 within a frame in which fire risk has become a relatively minor concern compared with 1900. We did not have the information in 1900 or even in 1950 to weigh the value of young lives potentially lost to fire against possible cases of cancer and mesothelioma in adults a half century later, and it is possible that our decision would have been no different if we had. Given the possibility of such a choice, we would obviously prefer to have neither fire deaths nor cancer but history seldom permits the luxury of straight forward comparison. Decisions to use asbestos and decision to restrict it were separated by many decades. It is highly improbable that any alternatives fire prevention technology we might have developed would have been risk-free; in fact Fiberglas and mineral wool both proposed alternatives to asbestos, are suspected health hazards.
adxasbestos removal.com 125 S Clark St Chicago, IL
Bodies at risk: the Asbestos Controversy
In the decades since the passage of the occupational safety and health act (OSHA) of 1970, asbestos has become a highly visible and controversial legal, scientific, and public health issue, with hundreds of thousands of exposure cases creating a virtual subindustry of torts. Thousands of hours of court time and millions of work hours, not to mention billions of dollars in settlements and judgements, are expaned annually in resolving issues related to asbestos. The rand institute for civil justice report that asbestos ligitation has so far cost businesses about $40 billion, and another $210 billion in costs are possible. The $50 billion coasts of asbestos removal –ang torts resulting from it-also add to the total, as does the $1 trillion in depreciation of asbestos- containing buildings. The burden on the courts is astonishing: by 1989, asbestos cases were 3.52 percent of all civil cases, and 61 percent of all product liability cases in the federal courts. Because the United States is the only industrial democracy in the world without national health insurance, the minority of asbestos plaintiffs who are actually sick have no recourse but litigation to defray the cost of care, thus making us also the only industrial nation that has permitted asbestos disease to become an apparently uncontrollable drain on our own economy as well as that of other nations.
Despite the public attention the controversy has received, there has been surprisingly little discussion of how and why asbestos was introduced into the built environment in the first place or of the risk perception and cost-benefit analysis that resulted in Americans use of an average of five to ten pounds of asbestos per person per year by the 1960’s. None of the major on asbestos risk cites any of theprofessional literature of fire protection; indeed, reading these works, one would not guess that such a literature exist or suppose that the opinion of any community of experts other than health professionals might be relevant to the debate. In an article included in Barry I Castleman and Stephen L. Bergers Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects, Berger, for example argues that alternatives to asbestos insulation have existed since 1890, citing as evidence a list of patents for products of which fewer than 10 percent were ever manufactured or tested. He declines even to mention the obvious necessity of testing materials for their cose compliance or to suggest how any of the supposed substitute might have fared on these tests.
Like nearly all new technologies, asbestos was evaluated between 1870 and 1964-64 against a background of the problems it solved, not of those we were later to learn that created. The negotiation of standards of safety in the united state has historically involved complex interactions among a variety of constituencies, including consumers, government, industry, and the community of experts, which typically include scientists, engineers, and physicians. The latter groups are by nature conservation, assimilating new knowledge slowly over period of years or even generations. The contagion debate of the nineteenth century was just such a controversy.
Perceived risks have been the impetus for the development of many kinds of technology, and it is not unusual for technologies to be developed that successfully reduce the originally perceived risk nut that are ultimately found to be flawed with risk of their own. Infant seats in automobiles are a recent case in point: they save adult lives but endanger small children. In the case of asbestos the perceived risk was fire, an obvious and unmistakable public health hazard. The united states, like all industrial democracies, attempts to base most policies on the principle first articulated by Jeremy Bentham, that of the greatest good for the greatest number. In 1948, of the approximately 10,000 Americans who die from fire every year, almost 40 percent were children-about teh deaths per day of children of elementary school age younger. In 1999 the latest year for which the centers for disease Control (CDC) have published statistics, 2,355 persons died of mesothelioma and 449 of asbestosis none of whom were under the age of fifteen. More children died every year fire. Before we built the fire safety system that includes asbestos, than adults are now dying from asbestos-related disease.
Asbestosis is a respiratory disease caused by inhaling asbestos fibers resulting in scarring of lung tissue, which gradually loses its elasticity. Length and intensity of exposure usually determine the severity of the disease. This is not always the case with mesothelioma, however, a type of cancer that produces tumor on the pleura (lining of the lungs) or the peritoneum (lining of the abdomen); neither length of exposure nor the intensity – the concentration of fibers in the inhaled air – are well correlated with the incidence of the disease, which has even been known to occur in individuals with no history of asbestos exposure. Miners in minerals found in association with asbestos, such as talc can develop both diseases. Latency periods are long, up to thirty years, a characteristic of asbestos disease that has greatly complicated traditional systems of _ workers compensation and other insurance. These programs were designed to cope with immediately obvious injuries and toxic effects, not those that do not manifest for two or three decades. In some states, workers must file claims within a period shorter than the latency period of mesothelioma, resulting in a flood of claims from the so far unimpaired. The number of claims exceeds the annual number of deaths from both diseases by two orders of magnitude.
Asbestos building materials and the system of fire safety of which they were an important component successfully reduced the annual rate of fire deaths in the United States from 9.1 per 100,000 in 1913 to I.O in 1998, during which period asbestos became one of the dominant technologies in structural fire prevention. Only after decades of widespread asbestos use did a new generation of epidemiologists begin to shift the attention of the public and of policymakers from the problems solved by the technology to those it apparently caused. According to William W Lowrance in of acceptable risk, we could not have known the effects of asbestos before a period of long exposure to it.
The framing or context of asbestos risk perception was altered by the apparent removal of the background of fire danger. A, tversky and D. Kahneman have shown that the framing of risk-benefit analysis can completely reverse preferences, even when the mathematically calculated utility of each outcome is identical. Asbestos was evaluated between 1900 and 1964 against a back drop of scenes such as that of the military and civilian bodies found in the ruins of the cocoanut grove nightclub in 1942 and the rows of the children’s bodies in the Chicago morgue after the lady of the angels’ school for 1958. Due in part to the widespread use of asbestos in construction between 1930-1980, large loss of life fires are now very rare, and the technology of asbestos is evaluated today against the backdrop of cases of mesothelioma and asbestos in adults.
Our answer to the policy question “Do we want to use asbestos?” has changed because a new scientific paradigm for asbestos has emerged since 1965 within a frame in which fire risk has become a relatively minor concern compared with 1900. We did not have the information in 1900 or even in 1950 to weigh the value of young lives potentially lost to fire against possible cases of cancer and mesothelioma in adults a half century later, and it is possible that our decision would have been no different if we had. Given the possibility of such a choice, we would obviously prefer to have neither fire deaths nor cancer but history seldom permits the luxury of straight forward comparison. Decisions to use asbestos and decision to restrict it were separated by many decades. It is highly improbable that any alternatives fire prevention technology we might have developed would have been risk-free; in fact Fiberglas and mineral wool both proposed alternatives to asbestos, are suspected health hazards.
adxasbestos removal.com 125 S Clark St Chicago, IL
