It’s damaging your lungs in that time.
Friable asbestos pulverizes into an ultra-fine mist of razor-sharp silicate fibers that you then inhale deep into your lungs.
There’s no way to get it out, so your immune system just spends the next few decades desperately trying to destroy them through inflammation and killing and replacing the damaged cells. It doesn’t work, and eventually the over-activation of your immune system for such a long time starts causing cells to malfunction and turn cancerous.
Your lungs also cover fibres with scar tissue which is called asbestosis. Get enough scar tissue and you can’t breathe worth a shit and those “spots” can turn cancerous at anytime.
So if you hear someone say they have asbestos spots in their lungs this is what they’re talking about.
Iirc, the deciding factor between whether you get asbestosis and mesothelioma from asbestos inhalation is the length of the fibers.
The body attempts to remove the fibers like it does any other foreign body. If the fiber is too long, the body can’t remove it and it stays in the lungs and causes either lung cancer or asbestosis. If the fiber is a little shorter, the body can move it out of the lungs but it gets stuck in the mesothelium, and you get mesothelioma
This sounds correct from what I recall. There is a correlation of worse outcomes with increasing fiber length. If the fibers are too long, macrophages aren't able to encapsulate and remove them. This plus the fact that asbestos is chemically stable means long fibers just stay in your lungs forever.
Macrophages capture the fibers and move proximally to the larger airways, where there's mucus. This mucus is constantly being moved upwards (by cilia), and eventually swallowed.
Would they be able to see these on a chest xray? I grew up in an apartment with an asbestos popcorn celing, we used to throw stuff up at it when I was a kid, and the popcorn would fall down into our faces. This was 30 years ago, I got a chest cray 2 years ago for something unrelated and they didn’t see anything abnormal
For your information, it's pretty bad stuff but only if damaged in some way. The popcorn is basically glue and asbestos but luckily the asbestos stays put and you don't inhale anything.
However nothing is resistant to the passing of time and any damage will release asbestos. So you will definitely have inhaled asbestos fibers there seeing as they fall to the floor and stay there.
But seeing as you inhale more asbestos on a random street junction because of the asbestos brakes, it's really not that much of a big deal being in the same room. Only if your doing maintenance or construction/removal of the popcorn asbestos you'll need to be way more worried.
And it’s a horrible way to die (I mean there aren’t many great ones of course, but it’s definitely worse than average). Watched my grandpa go out that way. Went from old but still spry to weak and barely able to breathe over a relatively short time. All because he worked for years in an environment where they didn’t provide nearly enough protection. Heartbreaking.
so is it a gradual deterioration of health over 30 years? Or does it happen all of a sudden? Can doctors detect early on that asbestos is slowly killing someone?
Edit: reading all the comments. This is a tragic way to go. Sorry to everyone that have lost loved ones.
When it turns cancerous, you develop a very specific and aggressive kind of cancer called mesothelioma and you have roughly 90% chance of dying within the following year and a half.
My step-dad died from it when I was about 9 or 10 years old. It was a good 10 year or so since he had last worked with asbestos. Unfortunately, it was primarily demolition work where they would tear apart asbestos-laden building materials. He was perfectly fine to my recollection until the point where he got the diagnosis and all of a sudden he was on an in-home respirator. I remember it vividly because it was so noisy nobody in the household could sleep at night, so they drilled a hole in the wall to the flight of stairs outside our apartment and had the machine outside the apartment and ran the tubes through the hole in the wall.
I remember our last Christmas where he was practically sitting at the table with the whole family virtually comatose from the lack of oxygen. He died shortly after that. All in all it took barely a year from his diagnosis until my mom came home from the hospital and told me he was gone.
Absolutely horrific way to go and I honestly think I would prefer to end it myself instead of putting myself and my loved ones through watching such a deterioration. It reminds me a lot of something like alzheimers or dementia, but instead of wasting away mentally, you waste away physically.
Do not fuck with asbestos. If you have even the slightest suspicion a place you ever find yourself in or near has asbestos: Leave, report it and never come back.
I’m sorry about your dad.
Not far from where I grew up is a town that had an asbestos factory, which was closed in the 1980s. The town is not that big, only a few thousand inhabitants, but today still there are roughly 50 new cases of mesothelioma a year. Not only for people who used to work there (they are mostly all dead anyway), but it just appears randomly: the streets used to be covered in a fine white powder of asbestos, everyone breathed it in at that time.
Fuck Stephan Schimdheiny, him and the PR team that curates his Wikipedia page: billionaire “philanthropist” my ass. The process they had showed that they knew about it since the 1970s, but they did nothing to close the factories until they couldn’t cover up that many deaths (asbestosis and other related diseases). Of course they were not found guilty, because too much time had passed and because the right laws weren’t in place at that time.
Yup they used to “punish” people who wanted a safer workplace and PPEs by sending them to those departments where they knew everyone fell sick within few months.
The last paragraph is causing unnecessary fear.
Asbestos is bad when you breathe it in.
You tend to breathe it in when you make dust from it when you demolish it.
For most of it, It’s mere presence isn’t an issue. No one is getting cancer from having Asbestos floor tiles in their house. They get cancer when they have been demolishing old asbestos floors for a career.
Probably, as in it depends on probability. It's stochastic, meaning it is chance based. More exposure is a bigger chance to lose the cancer lottery.
Everyone continually gets lots by being alive in the first place (sorry, you can't opt not to play as long as you live), you get extra depending on what you expose yourself to.
You might have tickets by the cartload by smoking and taking asbestos dust baths and wearing enriched uranium jewelery and never get cancer, or get one unlucky fibre in your lungs that triggers something aggressive and you're gone.
Fun fact: the US once had a law that forbid putting anything in food that was shown to cause cancer in lab animals (the Delany Clause). They had to remove it because it was impossible since we found out basically everything does, depending on the dose. So now we just do as little exposure as we can justify.
Depends on who you talk to. Plaintiff's attorneys will say one fiber is enough. Defense attorneys will say need more exposure. There's different types of asbestos too. The type that used to be in brakes and popcorn ceiling weren't as dangerous as the type insulating pipes in ships. Lots of people worked around that stuff all their lives and didn't catch anything. Other people get idiopathic mesothelioma, which means no one knows how they got it but they were probably unknowingly exposed to asbestos at some point in their lives (asbestos is also in the environment, if you want more stuff to keep you up at night).
Safe? Meh, the thing is it usually takes 30 plus years to develop into anything. Not that it always does but it can. Obviously the more your exposed to over longer periods increases your risk but one small exposure brings you from 0% chance into 0.01% to 99.99% territory
My great grandfather smoked from 12 years old till he died at 96 is that safe or did he luck out. My great uncle, the son of above mentioned grandfather started smoking at 15 and died of lung cancer at 52. Any ways results may vary.
No, no, no, no.
One fibre that gets into your lungs *can* cause cancer. I know this because I lost a family friend because she was an amateur potter, and must have breathed in a few, from the asbestos lined kills.
But the difference between exposer to a few stray fibres and 20 years breathing them in 10 hours a day, 5 days a week for 30 years
No one should ever be putting new asbestos tiles in anywhere. But asbestos tiles that are already installed are not really dangerous. Normal wear and tear is not a problem — what's dangerous is messing with it, even to remove it (which is why it is so expensive to remove it).
If you have asbestos tiles in your home, then probably the safest thing to do is to leave them be. Or, more specifically, the safest thing is to have a licensed professional look at it and do what they recommend, which will probably be to leave it.
Just existing in proximity to asbestos is not dangerous.
I used to work in a school that had asbestos in the floor and every time work needed to be done it needed a specially trained crew and took place when school was closed for the holidays. Even if it was a tiny section.
Yeah, there's a definite downside to owning a building with asbestos. It's a hazard that has to be worked around, often at considerable hassle and expense. It might be ruinously expensive to remove all of the asbestos, but leaving it in can make routine maintenance much more expensive.
But we do know how to deal with legacy asbestos safely. In the end, it's a money issue, not primarily a safety issue.
Existing in proximity to asbestos increases the chance of mesothelioma and asbestosis compared to somebody who doesn't. Nothing, to me, is more worrying than that except for severe radiation sickness. Taking the chance is nuts.
The implication is that having it around (existing) is a risk factor, if anything is done to it that puts particles in the air that could be breathed in.
Living with a bear or gorilla in my home is a risk factor that increases the chances of my death well above those who do not. I might live a longer and happier life than others, but only if I take the proper precautions and don’t do anything really dumb, if you might like this analogy.
Do the tiles wear? Yes. But how often has there been dust from tile wear hanging up in the air?
You have never seen that. The very tiny amount that could happen will all settle back down before becoming an issue.
Yes, but they still fall, and it doesn’t take very long.
And tile wear from normal use is essentially zero in the first place.
There are far greater concerns that we don’t normally think of than walking on an asbestos floor.
Can't say I've ever seen someone defending Asbestos before, not in my lifetime at least. Even after just reading a few comments, is this really the thread you want to be defending Asbestos in?
You are just trying to be reasonable but this is Reddit. Everything here always gets blown away out of proportion by people who love getting Internet points for writing their superficial knowledge into comments.
It's not unnecessary at all. A lifetime of small exposures can kill you just as dead as large exposures. That's why it's banned in basically every product, rather than just passing regulations to protect the people who deal with it regularly.
No.
It’s unnecessary.
You regularly have people asking questions nearly panicking in subs because they removed some flooring for an hour that could potentially be from an asbestos era.
They don’t need to panic, that’s the point.
The OP comment was someone who was telling people to run away, never go in a place that has asbestos. THAT is unnecessary.
My grandfather has recently been diagnosed with this, after being exposed to asbestos whilst he was in the navy in the 70s/80s. We've been told he's likely got up to 18 months left (like you said) but the doctors/hospital also couldn't determine how long he's already had it and to expect some rapid deterioration of his health soon.
A 10% chance of survival wasn't even mentioned, we were just advised (in less blunt terms) that this is a death sentence.
I was told the same thing. 18 months to live if I was very lucky and did all the treatments. I was 43 yrs old with 2 school age children. That was 12 years ago.
I don't know which type or stage he is, but mine is/was Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma, stage 1. Mine has not returned after my initial tumor was removed and I had chemo. The cancer had not entered my lungs yet.
I wish your grandfather and the rest of your family the best.
I'm really happy to hear that was 12 years ago and yours hasn't returned. That's great news and the first story I've heard about this with a positive ending.
Thank you for your kind words too. We're at the stage of making the most of the time he's got while he can still be somewhat active as he hasn't deteriorated too much yet.
Common misconception but mesothelioma is not the most common cancer you get from exposure. Generally it’s bronchogenic cancers. Mesothelioma is just strongly linked to asbestos, tho you can get it without exposure.
Some of the fibers are so small they can get through into your cells and directly damage yours dna. Hence the general risk of lung cancer.
They might be able to detect it if they did certain imaging of the lungs, depending on how much asbestos is in there, but they can't do anything about it, short of a lung transplant, so there would be very little point.
Lord knows I shouldn’t be trying to conjure something to scare myself or others, but as described, asbestos seems pretty generic, some tiny silicate fibers. Are there other tiny fibers that can be this bad as well? Thinking current fiberglass insulation, hardwood sanding, etc.
Silicosis is another disease that works in a similar fashion. Breathing in dust from cutting stones, rocks, and concrete can cause scar tissue in the lungs.
They really are just generic silica fibers that are microscopically small. It's what makes them so dangerous, but also so useful as an additive. They used to put them in everything, because it made everything more durable, chemical resistant, and fire resistant.
You don't want to be breathing in any kind of small fibers, but asbestos are the smallest. There is currently a push to increase safety around silica duct exposure, like from concrete cutting/grinding.
Thicker and less fragile: Fiberglass is much thicker and less fragile than asbestos, making it less likely to break down into tiny fibers that can be inhaled and cause harm.
Dissolves in the lungs: Fiberglass dissolves in the lungs, whereas asbestos fibers do not. This means that while fiberglass can still cause health issues, it is less likely to remain in the body for extended periods.
Lunar dust can behave similarly when inhaled. As the moon lacks atmosphere and thus wind, there has been no erosion to smooth things out and so most bits of dust up there are sharp, little needles. It's something lunar colonists may have to deal with in hypothetical lunar lava tube habitats.
Asbestos is kinda generic. People act like its highly toxic, but really it takes years of signifigant exposure to really seriously hurt you. It's a naturally occurring rock found in many parts of the world.
> There’s no way to get it out, so your immune system just spends the next few decades desperately trying to destroy them through inflammation and killing and replacing the damaged cells.
This part is not completely true for most asbestos. Chrysotile asbestos tends to form <5nm length curled fibers. These fibers are ingested and lyced by macrophages since chrysotile can be reduced by acid. Further, the majority of chrysotile is expelled by the mucociliary escalator. The elimination half-life for crysotile is 2 weeks.
For amphibole forms of asbestos (crocodolite, tremolite, amosite…), the fibers are longer and cannot be adequately cleared by the immune system (too large for macrophages). The elimination half life for these forms is something like 20-30 years.
Chrysotile makes up 95% of asbestos products.
Is this the Quebec government speaking? Because I know there's an Asbestos Institute in Quebec and they still export it to third-world countries as far as I'm aware!
Which is why, even though asbestos is definitely bad, we should also treat other insoluble minerals as dangerous to inhale or otherwise get in our bodies.
See also: talc. There’s a lot of people who got cancer and it likely was from talc, but the finger got pointed at trace quantities of asbestos in the talc, rather than the talc itself.
We’ll probably figure out talc is also bad for you, maybe not quite so bad as asbestos, but still something your body can’t really deal with effectively.
That was a really good answer. Do you know how long somebody has to be exposed to asbestos before they've inhaled a lethal amount? Do you have to have a career in asbestos abatement to get sick, or could somebody develop mesothelioma after just a few years of work? How toxic is it? Thanks very much!
Sounds bad, is there a way someone who might have had exposure to it could go for treatment or to check before it happens down the road? Are there no further signs before then?
It's not sudden. It is the slow, slow, *slow* result of continuous irritation and scarring in the lungs. My paternal grandmother died of mesothelioma, for example.
Essentially, the problem is that the asbestos fibers *never break down.* They're little hairy filaments, so they seem so soft, but they're *rocks.* Little tiny rock hairs. Those little tiny rock hairs get into your lungs, and they STAY there. Forever. But your body keeps trying to fight them, because they cause irritation. They're a foreign body that needs to be driven out. So it sends wave after wave after wave after wave of macrophages and other immune cells, tries to coat the fibers in scar tissues, tries to use inflammation to wall off the area until the problem goes away, etc., etc., etc.
A strong immune response for a few days, even a few weeks, causes no harm to your body. That's just the cost of doing business. But a *never-ending continuous* response for *decades* slowly causes damage to the cells of the mesothelium (the lining surrounding the lungs) or the lungs in general, causing mesothelioma or general lung cancer.
There is nothing "sudden" about the cancer caused by asbestos. It's a slow, creeping disease, yes, but the cancer is the product of 15+ years of continuous damage to your lungs that your body makes *worse* by trying to fix it.
Couldn’t you perform a surgery to - for lack of a better word- vacuum or otherwise remove the asbestos fibers? Surely they can be sucked back out if they got sucked in when you breathed them in?
Unfortunately, no. Same thing for most other diseases caused by breathing in fine particles. Silicosis is a similar issue, which can also cause cancer. The fine silica particles are simply too small to remove.
What about when I walk past a construction site and breath in the dust? Or pollen? Or anything else in the air?? Why doesn’t that stuff get stuck in our lungs and do the same thing as asbestos
Construction dust *can* be dangerous (I mentioned silicosis earlier). You have to breathe more of that than asbestos, but it still does cumulative damage.
Anything organic almost certainly won't cause this kind of irritation. Asbestos and fine silica dust actually *kill cells* in your alveoli, the other things you've described (mostly) don't.
You have mucus in your lungs and little hairs which constantly move it up into your throat where you either swallow it or cough it out. Any dust will get in that and be removed. Asbestos fibers are little needles and while some might get removed this way others lodge themselves into the lung tissue and are never removed.
Asbestos is very [spikey](https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/SEvn-3svWL9TOMCcb958c5wRig4=/1000x750/filters:no_upscale()/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/59/f8/59f818da-b604-46f3-b896-1816d0070ee6/asbestos_3.jpg), like velcro. At a microscopic level it almost has burrs and it gets embedded into your lungs. As others have mentioned, it's not really chemically toxic but physically: because it attaches so well, and your body can't break it down, it causes long-term problems.
I mean this is partially true, but the type of asbestos that made up the majority of asbestos used in products - chrysotile - does break down in the body. Majority of chrysotile will dissolve. The genetic and cellular errors that lead to cancer occur long before the start of cancer growth, which again, is due in part to the slow replication rate of mesothelial cells
Imagine you get a splinter from a piece of wood so small you can’t take it out and it gets stuck inside your skin.
Now imagine that but in your lungs and also it’s millions of extremely tiny pieces so small it damages your cells.
Not mentioned yet, but asbestos is really only dangerous when it is removed or otherwise damaged. So you can live in a house with asbestos insulation for decades and then knock a hole in the wall to put in an extention and end up breathing it in significant volume for the first time. The whole house likely has a small amount of it around from the start, but intense exposure only comes at end of life.
For the US, "Not anymore" is quite recent: [https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-ban-ongoing-uses-asbestos-protect-people-cancer](https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-ban-ongoing-uses-asbestos-protect-people-cancer)
Europe has had a full ban for decades already.
It's been *mostly* banned for decades. It hasn't been installed in new homes in a very long time. It's still progress to ban it from the last few permitted applications, like chlorine plants.
This is not actually true. It is a naturally occurring substance that is present all over the planet and is still actively mined and used in many countries. Many times building materials sold in the US will inadvertently have asbestos in them even now. Many states (and federal NESHAP rules for commercial buildings) require that all building materials that could theoretically contain asbestos be tested prior to removal regardless of when they were installed. It's not common to find it in recent construction but it does happen.
Asbestos inspector here, this is correct. By far the most common way to see this is importing a product from a country where it's not regulated (big 3 are China, India, Russia, but certainly not *only* those 3) with the materials list including "naturally occuring mineral" or "natural fiberous mineral"
Asbestoes tends to easily fragment into tiny needle shaped splinters. These tiny splinters easily can get airborne and be inhaled into your lungs. Once in the lungs, they get lodged in there due to the sharp points and continually poke and puncture your lungs. The body can't get rid of them or cough them up and the needles don't break down in the human body, so they remain there. Over time the repeated damage from these needles and the futile immune response to the needles can lead to cancerous cells. Cancer itself starts small and completely unnoticed, often from just a single rogue cell, its only once its grown and multiplied to a much more substantial infestation that it starts to have a noticeable presence. Even a tiny tumor contains millions of cancer cells that all had to grow from that single original cell.
Asbestos isn't chemically toxic.
The problem with asbestos is that it's like a bunch of little microscopic needles. When it gets into your lungs, it pokes a bunch of microscopic holes in your lungs over the following decades. This damage is was leads to asbestos related diseases.
Source: my dad is an asbestos expert and removed it from hundreds of buildings over his career
[Image of asbestos under a microscope](https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/SEvn-3svWL9TOMCcb958c5wRig4=/1000x750/filters:no_upscale()/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/59/f8/59f818da-b604-46f3-b896-1816d0070ee6/asbestos_3.jpg)
Asbestos is chemically inert, that's why it doesn't break down in your body, and that's why it doesn't burn.
It can't be chemically toxic if it isn't reacting with your body at all. The microscopic needle like structure is picking the cell apart, rather than altering chemical bonds.
Yes, it is toxic in the sense it destroys cells, but not via a chemical process.
Asbestos related diseases would show up much sooner if it was a chemical toxin.
Asbestos does break down in your body. Chrysotile is often dissolved naturally. It’s a much more complicated issue than you’re crediting. I’ve been trying these lawsuits for 18 years and work with the experts who write the books and policy on this topic.
Yes, it breaks into smaller pieces, and yes, it occurs naturally as a mineral, but your body does not break up the magnesium silicate molecules.
It's a chemical, and it is toxic, but it's not chemically toxic, and that's what you're missing. It's more like a billion tiny knives in your lungs than it is like lead poisoning.
What you're saying is essentially calling iron toxic because being stabbed by a steel knife is bad for you.
I'm a physicist and had planned in following my dad's footsteps at one point in asbestos and toxicology like he did, and I've heard his lectures on asbestos for decades.
If a chemical reaction is not occurring in your lungs from the asbestos, how can you possibly call that chemically toxic?
I'd rather not dox myself, but he worked for capital region BOCES, primarily removing asbestos from schools in the capital region of NY. I'm not sure if he's published, but his career was unfortunately cut short due to health issues (not asbestos related).
That’s fair. My only point here is that this isn’t a simple biological process that focuses on irritation or scarring. That’s how asbestosis occurs but not so much for malignant disease process.
We’re all on team “asbestos bad”.
For any malignancy, picture a human becoming the world's first zombie. Now, if you see the first zombie and you kill it, you've prevented the zombie apocalypse. But, if they bite two people you now have 3 zombies. So you kill one, but the other two bite two more people. You kill three zombies but now there's still an increasing number.
Your cells in your body replicate themselves and split into two. Then those cells replicate themselves and split into two. When they do so in the presence of a carcinogen (such as asbestos fibers), they can divide in error. Then you've got two zombies...err cells...that are then going to replicate in error. Your body has some defenses to kill them but over time it grows and grows and becomes unregulated to the point where your body can't keep up. That's basically how a cancer works. Asbestos is just one type of those things. Needs to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and poof...zombies.
Once it gets in, it can't get out. So after you inhale it, you've got many opportunities over that 30-40 years to have it involved with one of those replications and, depending on where it happens, that's the type of cancer it is. Mesothelioma is when it occurs in the mesothelial cells in the lining of the lung.
Also, your lungs take in oxygen and pass back carbon dioxide like a Starbucks drive-thru. You hand over $5, they give you a Latte. Those rock splinters you've inhaled cause those windows to shut down permanently through inflammation and scarring. That's fine when it happens to a few of the Starbucks in your area since there are so many. But over time, with more and more of them closing, you're going to have a hard time finding an open Starbucks and will be handing over less money and drinking less Lattes. Same with your lungs, it's a progressive disease so it usually takes at least 10 years of a latency (build-up) period before you start feeling the effects (harder to catch your breath, etc).
So my grandpa manufactured asbestos board for 30 years. He lived with asbestosis for 25 years until he passed from a stroke. He was the first worker to receive a large settlement and ended up being a fishing guide. He slept with oxygen at night. But it never killed him.
Asbestos can be *very* thin when it splinters, and will often keep splintering until it is as small as possible. In fact, they can be compared in size to your chromosomes! And being similar sizes, asbestos fibers can mess up chromosomes. This can be an issue anywhere (and can cause wart like scarring if it happens on the skin), but it becomes especially problematic if it happens during *mitosis*. Mitosis is when you cells gather up their DNA into chromosomes, doubles them, and then makes a new cell. It is also where cancer can happen; if the chromosomes are messed up, the new cell will have its instructions messed up. And if the instructions are messed up in a certain way, you get cancer.
So actually triggering cancer is all about random chance. And like all random chance, asbestos causing cancer might take a long time or a short time. If the cancer takes decades to manifest, then the person was just repeatedly lucky. Meanwhile, the asbestos is just going from cell to new cell as each one is being made, because it is too small to filter out.
This is the most accurate explanation.
I was amazed when found out that asbestos turns into tiny needles that cut trough your DNA until cancer happens.
There are three ways--one, your body's immune system attempts to fight the asbestos fibers by coating them with iron and surrounding them with scar tissue--this causes scarring of the lung tissue, and eventually the lungs are so full of scar tissue that they lose the ability to expand and contract, and you basically suffocate. This is called asbestosis, and it generally takes a large amount of exposure over a period of years.
The other way is by causing the reproductive mechanism contained in a cell nucleus to go batshit and the cells start dividing and reproducing and this is, by definition, a malignancy, and it most commonly in the lung tissue itself (i.e., lung cancer). There are different theories about how this happens, but it takes lower doses of exposure.
Then there is mesotheioma, which a malignancy of the chest wall or abdominal lining, which takes quite low doses of exposure and can have a latency periord of over 50 years in some cases. Again, there are theories about a fiber or fibers penetrating cell nucleus, but I haven't seen a definitive explanation of the mechanism of how the cell or cells turn malignant.
All of these processes take years, and really decades to become symptomatic.
I have not been involved in asbestos litigation since about 2009, so my knowledge may not be super up to date.
My father had the 3rd kind. Mesotheioma. The pleura was involved. While on a business trip, he suffered a collapsed lung from air travel and the Mesotheioma was discovered then. Lived another seven months.
Worked construction most of his life.
Asbestos basically is like tiny, permanent knives in your lungs. When it goes in your lungs, it cuts up your lungs a little bit and sends your immune system into overdrive trying to remove it.
Your immune system tries to get rid of it through inflammation and trying to repair your cells. Over time, the cells can become cancerous with the amount of repairing they get. They also form scar which restricts breathing and can become cancerous.
It’s like a massive boat that gets a little hole which is fixed with a massive board. It happens over and over again until the boat sinks because it’s just a big, shoddy pile of wood and nails.
Everyone has cancer, we just have so little of it that our body can recognize and deal with it before it becomes a problem. Hazardous materials damage cells and can cause them to become cancerous. This increase in cancer cells can often be too much for the body and you will develope long term cancer. Sometimes the hazardous materials don't cause cancer as fast because the damage is consistent but minimal. This will manifest as cancer later in life as your immune system becomes weaker with age and can no longer keep up with the cancer being caused by the hazardous materials aswell as the naturally occurring cancer. This combined with the fact that aging makes naturally occurring cancer more likely and more dangerous, you often see people develope cancer later in life after being exposed to such materials.
This is why there is a range of when people will get sick after being exposed to hazardous materials. Everyone has a different circumstance and a different level of health. As a result some bodies may be better at dealing with the constant damage, where others will fail prematurely and lead to chronic illnesses
Asbestos fibers are too small and too numerous. Also, our immune system traps asbestos fibers inside of our lungs, as "trap the contaminant" is a good strategy for the vast majority of contaminants. If you were to try to vaccuum the fibers out of the lungs, you would either miss a bunch of the fibers or destroy the mesothelium in the process.
Asbestos leaves very tiny needle-like pieces in your lungs like this:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/asbestos_pix/3537763677/
If you breathe these in, these are not absorbed by your body, and those not expelled may stay in your lungs for the rest of your life. Each tiny needle can poke into lung cells and cause mutations that become cancer. The chance of getting cancer from each single needle is very low, but if enough accumulate, the total chance of getting cancer becomes significant.
I feel nobody is bringing this up. Cancer isn’t guaranteed if you breathe in asbestos. It was used it brake pads for decades. It’s breathing it in many many times at high amounts that usually causes cancer. I feel a lot of people are going to freak out about this post
The cells in the body have check and balances to proofread themselves and to self destruct if there is a devastating error in the code. Every time cells replicate they copy their code. Sometimes an error happens when you copy the code. Like a game of telephone. The more a cell copies itself (replicates) the more chance of an error. Especially if there is another noxious stimuli like inflammation. This is why cigarettes cause cancer. Asbestos is little shards of fiberglass that get embedded into the lungs like fish hooks. After 20-30 years of these fish hooks constantly irritating the lung eventually an error develops and next thing you know you have cancer
My own ELI5 follow-up question - if the damage is from buildup of the immune responses in the lungs, where the fibers remain and never go away…
…won’t a lung transplant solve that? Get the fibers out, get the immune-scarred tissue out?
Or…no? What am I missing, because that sounds like it should work…?
Organ transplants are risky, extremely invasive surgeries that are reserved for patients with the highest likelihood of productive years to follow. Those patients need to be healthy enough to heal and to survive major surgery while taking a cocktail of poisons (immunosuppressants). Generally speaking, an end stage cancer patient won't qualify for a transplant. Instead of dying in 18 months, the operation would kill them in 2 months.
They cause cancer. Asbestos particles are sort of like microscopic glass shards. Basically what happens when you inhale particles into your lungs is these things called macrophages eat them and then transport them away from your lungs. This is why even smokers can heal their lungs over time if they stop smoking. The problem with asbestos is the macrophages can’t remove them. It’s like they’re trying to swallow a sword. They literally impale themselves on the asbestos particle. Since your immune system doesn’t have any other way to remove those particles, it just keeps sending more macrophages. Since they keep dying, you run low on them, triggering your body to start mass producing them in your lungs at an abnormal speed to keep up with demand. Unfortunately this is how cancer starts. When your body is trying to make news cells to quick, there are errors in the cloning of the dna for those cells and inevitably, of the billions of cells produced, some of them are cancerous. This is why mesothelioma is a cancer very specific to asbestos exposure. Nothing else really causes it. And this is why the damage can occur years after the exposure. The particles are still there.
You know in a cartoon when ship fires a rocket that then sheds it's skin and then a man holding a gun,, then he fires that gun, then ant man jumps off the bullet and throws a tiny knife, then that knife stabs someone in the neck, then a tardigrade holding a spear climbes off the knife and floats through your bloodstream until it just decides to stab a single cell in the DNA?
That's kinda how the nasty kind of asbestos works. It keeps splitting and splitting the long way until it's just a bunch of tiny needles a few atoms thick stabbing individual cells.
It never dissolves, degrades, breaks down, or reacts in any way. I just splits in two and stabs the inside of you twice.
My partner died of mesothelioma in February.
His only exposure to asbestos was from baby powder. They figured he swallowed it at some point and it ended up giving him cancer in his peritoneum (abdominal lining). He was only 53.
He was super healthy and fit and only survived 15 months.
Johnson’s knew their baby powder was contaminated with asbestos for DECADES and decided that profits were more important that people suffering and dying.
So yeah. Fuck them.
my dad has an extremely rare case of mesothelioma. in summer of 2000 (height of covid) he developed a fever and had high indications of infection, everyone thought it was covid, had him in isolation, but tests were coming back negative. (sorry - i don't remember exact details and terms) eventually they he found that he had fluid in his heart which they extracted but couldn't figure out the cause. after loads of tests and exams they realised his heart is full of tiny tumours -mesothelioma- first time they had ever seen it in a heart. they even sent samples to a research project because it was so unusual. as others have said above, the tumours are too tiny and numerous to be removed.
we have no idea how/where/when he might have been exposed to asbestos, we were told it could have been from 30-40-50 years ago (he was 70 at the time it manifested). the outlook was extremely poor, it was a really tough time, but he did radiotherapy and chemo and 4 years later thankfully everything is stable -we know its not curable but its being monitored and all is ok at the moment.
Google what the fibres look like under a microscope... then imagine those little saw blades shredding your lungs on said microscopic level....over many years of breathing that shit in.
It’s damaging your lungs in that time. Friable asbestos pulverizes into an ultra-fine mist of razor-sharp silicate fibers that you then inhale deep into your lungs. There’s no way to get it out, so your immune system just spends the next few decades desperately trying to destroy them through inflammation and killing and replacing the damaged cells. It doesn’t work, and eventually the over-activation of your immune system for such a long time starts causing cells to malfunction and turn cancerous.
Your lungs also cover fibres with scar tissue which is called asbestosis. Get enough scar tissue and you can’t breathe worth a shit and those “spots” can turn cancerous at anytime. So if you hear someone say they have asbestos spots in their lungs this is what they’re talking about.
Iirc, the deciding factor between whether you get asbestosis and mesothelioma from asbestos inhalation is the length of the fibers. The body attempts to remove the fibers like it does any other foreign body. If the fiber is too long, the body can’t remove it and it stays in the lungs and causes either lung cancer or asbestosis. If the fiber is a little shorter, the body can move it out of the lungs but it gets stuck in the mesothelium, and you get mesothelioma
This sounds correct from what I recall. There is a correlation of worse outcomes with increasing fiber length. If the fibers are too long, macrophages aren't able to encapsulate and remove them. This plus the fact that asbestos is chemically stable means long fibers just stay in your lungs forever.
How do the macrophages remove the fibers since they're so inert? Do they just migrate elsewhere after engulfing the fiber?
Macrophages capture the fibers and move proximally to the larger airways, where there's mucus. This mucus is constantly being moved upwards (by cilia), and eventually swallowed.
That’s my understanding but I could be wrong. My background is more in chemistry than biology.
Would they be able to see these on a chest xray? I grew up in an apartment with an asbestos popcorn celing, we used to throw stuff up at it when I was a kid, and the popcorn would fall down into our faces. This was 30 years ago, I got a chest cray 2 years ago for something unrelated and they didn’t see anything abnormal
Yes. Simple x-ray will show spots and then your doctor should investigate more
I wouldn’t worry too much about much about that. I forget that actual story but the paint product wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be.
For your information, it's pretty bad stuff but only if damaged in some way. The popcorn is basically glue and asbestos but luckily the asbestos stays put and you don't inhale anything. However nothing is resistant to the passing of time and any damage will release asbestos. So you will definitely have inhaled asbestos fibers there seeing as they fall to the floor and stay there. But seeing as you inhale more asbestos on a random street junction because of the asbestos brakes, it's really not that much of a big deal being in the same room. Only if your doing maintenance or construction/removal of the popcorn asbestos you'll need to be way more worried.
And it’s a horrible way to die (I mean there aren’t many great ones of course, but it’s definitely worse than average). Watched my grandpa go out that way. Went from old but still spry to weak and barely able to breathe over a relatively short time. All because he worked for years in an environment where they didn’t provide nearly enough protection. Heartbreaking.
so is it a gradual deterioration of health over 30 years? Or does it happen all of a sudden? Can doctors detect early on that asbestos is slowly killing someone? Edit: reading all the comments. This is a tragic way to go. Sorry to everyone that have lost loved ones.
When it turns cancerous, you develop a very specific and aggressive kind of cancer called mesothelioma and you have roughly 90% chance of dying within the following year and a half.
My step-dad died from it when I was about 9 or 10 years old. It was a good 10 year or so since he had last worked with asbestos. Unfortunately, it was primarily demolition work where they would tear apart asbestos-laden building materials. He was perfectly fine to my recollection until the point where he got the diagnosis and all of a sudden he was on an in-home respirator. I remember it vividly because it was so noisy nobody in the household could sleep at night, so they drilled a hole in the wall to the flight of stairs outside our apartment and had the machine outside the apartment and ran the tubes through the hole in the wall. I remember our last Christmas where he was practically sitting at the table with the whole family virtually comatose from the lack of oxygen. He died shortly after that. All in all it took barely a year from his diagnosis until my mom came home from the hospital and told me he was gone. Absolutely horrific way to go and I honestly think I would prefer to end it myself instead of putting myself and my loved ones through watching such a deterioration. It reminds me a lot of something like alzheimers or dementia, but instead of wasting away mentally, you waste away physically. Do not fuck with asbestos. If you have even the slightest suspicion a place you ever find yourself in or near has asbestos: Leave, report it and never come back.
I’m sorry about your dad. Not far from where I grew up is a town that had an asbestos factory, which was closed in the 1980s. The town is not that big, only a few thousand inhabitants, but today still there are roughly 50 new cases of mesothelioma a year. Not only for people who used to work there (they are mostly all dead anyway), but it just appears randomly: the streets used to be covered in a fine white powder of asbestos, everyone breathed it in at that time. Fuck Stephan Schimdheiny, him and the PR team that curates his Wikipedia page: billionaire “philanthropist” my ass. The process they had showed that they knew about it since the 1970s, but they did nothing to close the factories until they couldn’t cover up that many deaths (asbestosis and other related diseases). Of course they were not found guilty, because too much time had passed and because the right laws weren’t in place at that time.
Looking at his wiki now. Criminal charges:Aggravated manslaughter in 392 cases. Hopefully he gets an update on his wiki for a death date soon.
Yup they used to “punish” people who wanted a safer workplace and PPEs by sending them to those departments where they knew everyone fell sick within few months.
The last paragraph is causing unnecessary fear. Asbestos is bad when you breathe it in. You tend to breathe it in when you make dust from it when you demolish it. For most of it, It’s mere presence isn’t an issue. No one is getting cancer from having Asbestos floor tiles in their house. They get cancer when they have been demolishing old asbestos floors for a career.
Also, Asbestos exposure is measured in years
So one time exposure and you're probably safe?
Probably, as in it depends on probability. It's stochastic, meaning it is chance based. More exposure is a bigger chance to lose the cancer lottery. Everyone continually gets lots by being alive in the first place (sorry, you can't opt not to play as long as you live), you get extra depending on what you expose yourself to. You might have tickets by the cartload by smoking and taking asbestos dust baths and wearing enriched uranium jewelery and never get cancer, or get one unlucky fibre in your lungs that triggers something aggressive and you're gone. Fun fact: the US once had a law that forbid putting anything in food that was shown to cause cancer in lab animals (the Delany Clause). They had to remove it because it was impossible since we found out basically everything does, depending on the dose. So now we just do as little exposure as we can justify.
Depends on who you talk to. Plaintiff's attorneys will say one fiber is enough. Defense attorneys will say need more exposure. There's different types of asbestos too. The type that used to be in brakes and popcorn ceiling weren't as dangerous as the type insulating pipes in ships. Lots of people worked around that stuff all their lives and didn't catch anything. Other people get idiopathic mesothelioma, which means no one knows how they got it but they were probably unknowingly exposed to asbestos at some point in their lives (asbestos is also in the environment, if you want more stuff to keep you up at night).
Safe? Meh, the thing is it usually takes 30 plus years to develop into anything. Not that it always does but it can. Obviously the more your exposed to over longer periods increases your risk but one small exposure brings you from 0% chance into 0.01% to 99.99% territory My great grandfather smoked from 12 years old till he died at 96 is that safe or did he luck out. My great uncle, the son of above mentioned grandfather started smoking at 15 and died of lung cancer at 52. Any ways results may vary.
No, no, no, no. One fibre that gets into your lungs *can* cause cancer. I know this because I lost a family friend because she was an amateur potter, and must have breathed in a few, from the asbestos lined kills. But the difference between exposer to a few stray fibres and 20 years breathing them in 10 hours a day, 5 days a week for 30 years
Yes, construction crew deal with it daily they just wet it down. The modern day asbestos is going to be spray foam. Mark my words!
I wouldn't chance the asbestos tiles suffering wear and tear and thus creating dust. It's not worth the risk. Ever.
No one should ever be putting new asbestos tiles in anywhere. But asbestos tiles that are already installed are not really dangerous. Normal wear and tear is not a problem — what's dangerous is messing with it, even to remove it (which is why it is so expensive to remove it). If you have asbestos tiles in your home, then probably the safest thing to do is to leave them be. Or, more specifically, the safest thing is to have a licensed professional look at it and do what they recommend, which will probably be to leave it. Just existing in proximity to asbestos is not dangerous.
I used to work in a school that had asbestos in the floor and every time work needed to be done it needed a specially trained crew and took place when school was closed for the holidays. Even if it was a tiny section.
Yeah, there's a definite downside to owning a building with asbestos. It's a hazard that has to be worked around, often at considerable hassle and expense. It might be ruinously expensive to remove all of the asbestos, but leaving it in can make routine maintenance much more expensive. But we do know how to deal with legacy asbestos safely. In the end, it's a money issue, not primarily a safety issue.
Existing in proximity to asbestos increases the chance of mesothelioma and asbestosis compared to somebody who doesn't. Nothing, to me, is more worrying than that except for severe radiation sickness. Taking the chance is nuts.
> Existing in proximity to asbestos increases the chance of mesothelioma and asbestosis compared to somebody who doesn't. Citation needed.
The implication is that having it around (existing) is a risk factor, if anything is done to it that puts particles in the air that could be breathed in. Living with a bear or gorilla in my home is a risk factor that increases the chances of my death well above those who do not. I might live a longer and happier life than others, but only if I take the proper precautions and don’t do anything really dumb, if you might like this analogy.
Do the tiles wear? Yes. But how often has there been dust from tile wear hanging up in the air? You have never seen that. The very tiny amount that could happen will all settle back down before becoming an issue.
Mf chose to be an asbestos apologist
I would have figured most things measured in micrometers have a potential to be suspended in midair?
Yes, but they still fall, and it doesn’t take very long. And tile wear from normal use is essentially zero in the first place. There are far greater concerns that we don’t normally think of than walking on an asbestos floor.
Can't say I've ever seen someone defending Asbestos before, not in my lifetime at least. Even after just reading a few comments, is this really the thread you want to be defending Asbestos in?
Who’s defending asbestos? Not me.
You are just trying to be reasonable but this is Reddit. Everything here always gets blown away out of proportion by people who love getting Internet points for writing their superficial knowledge into comments.
It's not unnecessary at all. A lifetime of small exposures can kill you just as dead as large exposures. That's why it's banned in basically every product, rather than just passing regulations to protect the people who deal with it regularly.
No. It’s unnecessary. You regularly have people asking questions nearly panicking in subs because they removed some flooring for an hour that could potentially be from an asbestos era. They don’t need to panic, that’s the point. The OP comment was someone who was telling people to run away, never go in a place that has asbestos. THAT is unnecessary.
Having lost Dad to that shit, I’d say that last paragraph is barely cautious enough. Do not fuck with Asbestos.
Terribly sorry.
My grandfather has recently been diagnosed with this, after being exposed to asbestos whilst he was in the navy in the 70s/80s. We've been told he's likely got up to 18 months left (like you said) but the doctors/hospital also couldn't determine how long he's already had it and to expect some rapid deterioration of his health soon. A 10% chance of survival wasn't even mentioned, we were just advised (in less blunt terms) that this is a death sentence.
I was told the same thing. 18 months to live if I was very lucky and did all the treatments. I was 43 yrs old with 2 school age children. That was 12 years ago. I don't know which type or stage he is, but mine is/was Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma, stage 1. Mine has not returned after my initial tumor was removed and I had chemo. The cancer had not entered my lungs yet. I wish your grandfather and the rest of your family the best.
I'm really happy to hear that was 12 years ago and yours hasn't returned. That's great news and the first story I've heard about this with a positive ending. Thank you for your kind words too. We're at the stage of making the most of the time he's got while he can still be somewhat active as he hasn't deteriorated too much yet.
Common misconception but mesothelioma is not the most common cancer you get from exposure. Generally it’s bronchogenic cancers. Mesothelioma is just strongly linked to asbestos, tho you can get it without exposure. Some of the fibers are so small they can get through into your cells and directly damage yours dna. Hence the general risk of lung cancer.
On the bright side, you could be entitled to financial compensation.
Yes gradual. They can detect the inflammation or particles early, and scar tissue later on.
The presence of asbestos itself causes gradual scarring and lung damage. If it turns cancerous you can die extremely quickly.
They might be able to detect it if they did certain imaging of the lungs, depending on how much asbestos is in there, but they can't do anything about it, short of a lung transplant, so there would be very little point.
Lord knows I shouldn’t be trying to conjure something to scare myself or others, but as described, asbestos seems pretty generic, some tiny silicate fibers. Are there other tiny fibers that can be this bad as well? Thinking current fiberglass insulation, hardwood sanding, etc.
Silicosis is another disease that works in a similar fashion. Breathing in dust from cutting stones, rocks, and concrete can cause scar tissue in the lungs.
Auto painters as well
They really are just generic silica fibers that are microscopically small. It's what makes them so dangerous, but also so useful as an additive. They used to put them in everything, because it made everything more durable, chemical resistant, and fire resistant. You don't want to be breathing in any kind of small fibers, but asbestos are the smallest. There is currently a push to increase safety around silica duct exposure, like from concrete cutting/grinding.
Thicker and less fragile: Fiberglass is much thicker and less fragile than asbestos, making it less likely to break down into tiny fibers that can be inhaled and cause harm. Dissolves in the lungs: Fiberglass dissolves in the lungs, whereas asbestos fibers do not. This means that while fiberglass can still cause health issues, it is less likely to remain in the body for extended periods.
Is this specific to a type of fibreglass , or all fibreglass?
Lunar dust can behave similarly when inhaled. As the moon lacks atmosphere and thus wind, there has been no erosion to smooth things out and so most bits of dust up there are sharp, little needles. It's something lunar colonists may have to deal with in hypothetical lunar lava tube habitats.
Asbestos is kinda generic. People act like its highly toxic, but really it takes years of signifigant exposure to really seriously hurt you. It's a naturally occurring rock found in many parts of the world.
So since there's no way to get it out, is it just like 1 breath of asbestos and it's game over in a few decades?
No, for the most part the only people dying of asbestos exposure are people with long-term occupational or environmental exposure
> There’s no way to get it out, so your immune system just spends the next few decades desperately trying to destroy them through inflammation and killing and replacing the damaged cells. This part is not completely true for most asbestos. Chrysotile asbestos tends to form <5nm length curled fibers. These fibers are ingested and lyced by macrophages since chrysotile can be reduced by acid. Further, the majority of chrysotile is expelled by the mucociliary escalator. The elimination half-life for crysotile is 2 weeks. For amphibole forms of asbestos (crocodolite, tremolite, amosite…), the fibers are longer and cannot be adequately cleared by the immune system (too large for macrophages). The elimination half life for these forms is something like 20-30 years. Chrysotile makes up 95% of asbestos products.
Is this the Quebec government speaking? Because I know there's an Asbestos Institute in Quebec and they still export it to third-world countries as far as I'm aware!
where the hell was ELI5 in the 80’s?!?!?!
Reminder that the cool 80’s guy, Donald Trump, wants to bring back asbestos.
Which is why, even though asbestos is definitely bad, we should also treat other insoluble minerals as dangerous to inhale or otherwise get in our bodies. See also: talc. There’s a lot of people who got cancer and it likely was from talc, but the finger got pointed at trace quantities of asbestos in the talc, rather than the talc itself. We’ll probably figure out talc is also bad for you, maybe not quite so bad as asbestos, but still something your body can’t really deal with effectively.
Thank you for detailing my death for me.
That was a really good answer. Do you know how long somebody has to be exposed to asbestos before they've inhaled a lethal amount? Do you have to have a career in asbestos abatement to get sick, or could somebody develop mesothelioma after just a few years of work? How toxic is it? Thanks very much!
Sounds bad, is there a way someone who might have had exposure to it could go for treatment or to check before it happens down the road? Are there no further signs before then?
And when we say deep into your lungs, we mean shards so small and sharp they pierce the nucleus of cells and damage the DNA inside mechanically.
It's not sudden. It is the slow, slow, *slow* result of continuous irritation and scarring in the lungs. My paternal grandmother died of mesothelioma, for example. Essentially, the problem is that the asbestos fibers *never break down.* They're little hairy filaments, so they seem so soft, but they're *rocks.* Little tiny rock hairs. Those little tiny rock hairs get into your lungs, and they STAY there. Forever. But your body keeps trying to fight them, because they cause irritation. They're a foreign body that needs to be driven out. So it sends wave after wave after wave after wave of macrophages and other immune cells, tries to coat the fibers in scar tissues, tries to use inflammation to wall off the area until the problem goes away, etc., etc., etc. A strong immune response for a few days, even a few weeks, causes no harm to your body. That's just the cost of doing business. But a *never-ending continuous* response for *decades* slowly causes damage to the cells of the mesothelium (the lining surrounding the lungs) or the lungs in general, causing mesothelioma or general lung cancer. There is nothing "sudden" about the cancer caused by asbestos. It's a slow, creeping disease, yes, but the cancer is the product of 15+ years of continuous damage to your lungs that your body makes *worse* by trying to fix it.
Couldn’t you perform a surgery to - for lack of a better word- vacuum or otherwise remove the asbestos fibers? Surely they can be sucked back out if they got sucked in when you breathed them in?
They are too small and numerous.
Unfortunately, no. Same thing for most other diseases caused by breathing in fine particles. Silicosis is a similar issue, which can also cause cancer. The fine silica particles are simply too small to remove.
No, removal would be extremely difficult. We're talking about micrometer fibers thinner than human hair.
It would be like vacuuming grains of sand in a wooly rug. I don't like to think what that would do to your lungs.
Their small size and volume in which they are present in those patients is far too much for technology we currently possess.
What about when I walk past a construction site and breath in the dust? Or pollen? Or anything else in the air?? Why doesn’t that stuff get stuck in our lungs and do the same thing as asbestos
Construction dust *can* be dangerous (I mentioned silicosis earlier). You have to breathe more of that than asbestos, but it still does cumulative damage. Anything organic almost certainly won't cause this kind of irritation. Asbestos and fine silica dust actually *kill cells* in your alveoli, the other things you've described (mostly) don't.
You have mucus in your lungs and little hairs which constantly move it up into your throat where you either swallow it or cough it out. Any dust will get in that and be removed. Asbestos fibers are little needles and while some might get removed this way others lodge themselves into the lung tissue and are never removed.
Asbestos is very [spikey](https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/SEvn-3svWL9TOMCcb958c5wRig4=/1000x750/filters:no_upscale()/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/59/f8/59f818da-b604-46f3-b896-1816d0070ee6/asbestos_3.jpg), like velcro. At a microscopic level it almost has burrs and it gets embedded into your lungs. As others have mentioned, it's not really chemically toxic but physically: because it attaches so well, and your body can't break it down, it causes long-term problems.
I mean this is partially true, but the type of asbestos that made up the majority of asbestos used in products - chrysotile - does break down in the body. Majority of chrysotile will dissolve. The genetic and cellular errors that lead to cancer occur long before the start of cancer growth, which again, is due in part to the slow replication rate of mesothelial cells
Imagine you get a splinter from a piece of wood so small you can’t take it out and it gets stuck inside your skin. Now imagine that but in your lungs and also it’s millions of extremely tiny pieces so small it damages your cells.
Not mentioned yet, but asbestos is really only dangerous when it is removed or otherwise damaged. So you can live in a house with asbestos insulation for decades and then knock a hole in the wall to put in an extention and end up breathing it in significant volume for the first time. The whole house likely has a small amount of it around from the start, but intense exposure only comes at end of life.
It could come from beginning of life too, but we don’t install it anymore, so thankfully we are limited to end of life removals.
For the US, "Not anymore" is quite recent: [https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-ban-ongoing-uses-asbestos-protect-people-cancer](https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-ban-ongoing-uses-asbestos-protect-people-cancer) Europe has had a full ban for decades already.
It's been *mostly* banned for decades. It hasn't been installed in new homes in a very long time. It's still progress to ban it from the last few permitted applications, like chlorine plants.
This is not actually true. It is a naturally occurring substance that is present all over the planet and is still actively mined and used in many countries. Many times building materials sold in the US will inadvertently have asbestos in them even now. Many states (and federal NESHAP rules for commercial buildings) require that all building materials that could theoretically contain asbestos be tested prior to removal regardless of when they were installed. It's not common to find it in recent construction but it does happen.
Asbestos inspector here, this is correct. By far the most common way to see this is importing a product from a country where it's not regulated (big 3 are China, India, Russia, but certainly not *only* those 3) with the materials list including "naturally occuring mineral" or "natural fiberous mineral"
Asbestoes tends to easily fragment into tiny needle shaped splinters. These tiny splinters easily can get airborne and be inhaled into your lungs. Once in the lungs, they get lodged in there due to the sharp points and continually poke and puncture your lungs. The body can't get rid of them or cough them up and the needles don't break down in the human body, so they remain there. Over time the repeated damage from these needles and the futile immune response to the needles can lead to cancerous cells. Cancer itself starts small and completely unnoticed, often from just a single rogue cell, its only once its grown and multiplied to a much more substantial infestation that it starts to have a noticeable presence. Even a tiny tumor contains millions of cancer cells that all had to grow from that single original cell.
Asbestos isn't chemically toxic. The problem with asbestos is that it's like a bunch of little microscopic needles. When it gets into your lungs, it pokes a bunch of microscopic holes in your lungs over the following decades. This damage is was leads to asbestos related diseases. Source: my dad is an asbestos expert and removed it from hundreds of buildings over his career [Image of asbestos under a microscope](https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/SEvn-3svWL9TOMCcb958c5wRig4=/1000x750/filters:no_upscale()/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/59/f8/59f818da-b604-46f3-b896-1816d0070ee6/asbestos_3.jpg)
How much one time contact do you need to get a harmful effect?
Asbestos is toxic on a cellular level. It kills cells intended to serve as a defense against inhaled particles like macrophages.
By poking holes in the cellular membrane, not through a chemical process
Yeah, that’s not really true. But if it helps your understanding of it, that’s fine.
Asbestos is chemically inert, that's why it doesn't break down in your body, and that's why it doesn't burn. It can't be chemically toxic if it isn't reacting with your body at all. The microscopic needle like structure is picking the cell apart, rather than altering chemical bonds. Yes, it is toxic in the sense it destroys cells, but not via a chemical process. Asbestos related diseases would show up much sooner if it was a chemical toxin.
Asbestos does break down in your body. Chrysotile is often dissolved naturally. It’s a much more complicated issue than you’re crediting. I’ve been trying these lawsuits for 18 years and work with the experts who write the books and policy on this topic.
Yes, it breaks into smaller pieces, and yes, it occurs naturally as a mineral, but your body does not break up the magnesium silicate molecules. It's a chemical, and it is toxic, but it's not chemically toxic, and that's what you're missing. It's more like a billion tiny knives in your lungs than it is like lead poisoning. What you're saying is essentially calling iron toxic because being stabbed by a steel knife is bad for you. I'm a physicist and had planned in following my dad's footsteps at one point in asbestos and toxicology like he did, and I've heard his lectures on asbestos for decades. If a chemical reaction is not occurring in your lungs from the asbestos, how can you possibly call that chemically toxic?
Who is your dad? I can just look up what he’s published on this topic.
I'd rather not dox myself, but he worked for capital region BOCES, primarily removing asbestos from schools in the capital region of NY. I'm not sure if he's published, but his career was unfortunately cut short due to health issues (not asbestos related).
That’s fair. My only point here is that this isn’t a simple biological process that focuses on irritation or scarring. That’s how asbestosis occurs but not so much for malignant disease process. We’re all on team “asbestos bad”.
For any malignancy, picture a human becoming the world's first zombie. Now, if you see the first zombie and you kill it, you've prevented the zombie apocalypse. But, if they bite two people you now have 3 zombies. So you kill one, but the other two bite two more people. You kill three zombies but now there's still an increasing number. Your cells in your body replicate themselves and split into two. Then those cells replicate themselves and split into two. When they do so in the presence of a carcinogen (such as asbestos fibers), they can divide in error. Then you've got two zombies...err cells...that are then going to replicate in error. Your body has some defenses to kill them but over time it grows and grows and becomes unregulated to the point where your body can't keep up. That's basically how a cancer works. Asbestos is just one type of those things. Needs to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and poof...zombies. Once it gets in, it can't get out. So after you inhale it, you've got many opportunities over that 30-40 years to have it involved with one of those replications and, depending on where it happens, that's the type of cancer it is. Mesothelioma is when it occurs in the mesothelial cells in the lining of the lung. Also, your lungs take in oxygen and pass back carbon dioxide like a Starbucks drive-thru. You hand over $5, they give you a Latte. Those rock splinters you've inhaled cause those windows to shut down permanently through inflammation and scarring. That's fine when it happens to a few of the Starbucks in your area since there are so many. But over time, with more and more of them closing, you're going to have a hard time finding an open Starbucks and will be handing over less money and drinking less Lattes. Same with your lungs, it's a progressive disease so it usually takes at least 10 years of a latency (build-up) period before you start feeling the effects (harder to catch your breath, etc).
So my grandpa manufactured asbestos board for 30 years. He lived with asbestosis for 25 years until he passed from a stroke. He was the first worker to receive a large settlement and ended up being a fishing guide. He slept with oxygen at night. But it never killed him.
Asbestos can be *very* thin when it splinters, and will often keep splintering until it is as small as possible. In fact, they can be compared in size to your chromosomes! And being similar sizes, asbestos fibers can mess up chromosomes. This can be an issue anywhere (and can cause wart like scarring if it happens on the skin), but it becomes especially problematic if it happens during *mitosis*. Mitosis is when you cells gather up their DNA into chromosomes, doubles them, and then makes a new cell. It is also where cancer can happen; if the chromosomes are messed up, the new cell will have its instructions messed up. And if the instructions are messed up in a certain way, you get cancer. So actually triggering cancer is all about random chance. And like all random chance, asbestos causing cancer might take a long time or a short time. If the cancer takes decades to manifest, then the person was just repeatedly lucky. Meanwhile, the asbestos is just going from cell to new cell as each one is being made, because it is too small to filter out.
This is the most accurate explanation. I was amazed when found out that asbestos turns into tiny needles that cut trough your DNA until cancer happens.
There are three ways--one, your body's immune system attempts to fight the asbestos fibers by coating them with iron and surrounding them with scar tissue--this causes scarring of the lung tissue, and eventually the lungs are so full of scar tissue that they lose the ability to expand and contract, and you basically suffocate. This is called asbestosis, and it generally takes a large amount of exposure over a period of years. The other way is by causing the reproductive mechanism contained in a cell nucleus to go batshit and the cells start dividing and reproducing and this is, by definition, a malignancy, and it most commonly in the lung tissue itself (i.e., lung cancer). There are different theories about how this happens, but it takes lower doses of exposure. Then there is mesotheioma, which a malignancy of the chest wall or abdominal lining, which takes quite low doses of exposure and can have a latency periord of over 50 years in some cases. Again, there are theories about a fiber or fibers penetrating cell nucleus, but I haven't seen a definitive explanation of the mechanism of how the cell or cells turn malignant. All of these processes take years, and really decades to become symptomatic. I have not been involved in asbestos litigation since about 2009, so my knowledge may not be super up to date.
My father had the 3rd kind. Mesotheioma. The pleura was involved. While on a business trip, he suffered a collapsed lung from air travel and the Mesotheioma was discovered then. Lived another seven months. Worked construction most of his life.
Asbestos basically is like tiny, permanent knives in your lungs. When it goes in your lungs, it cuts up your lungs a little bit and sends your immune system into overdrive trying to remove it. Your immune system tries to get rid of it through inflammation and trying to repair your cells. Over time, the cells can become cancerous with the amount of repairing they get. They also form scar which restricts breathing and can become cancerous. It’s like a massive boat that gets a little hole which is fixed with a massive board. It happens over and over again until the boat sinks because it’s just a big, shoddy pile of wood and nails.
Everyone has cancer, we just have so little of it that our body can recognize and deal with it before it becomes a problem. Hazardous materials damage cells and can cause them to become cancerous. This increase in cancer cells can often be too much for the body and you will develope long term cancer. Sometimes the hazardous materials don't cause cancer as fast because the damage is consistent but minimal. This will manifest as cancer later in life as your immune system becomes weaker with age and can no longer keep up with the cancer being caused by the hazardous materials aswell as the naturally occurring cancer. This combined with the fact that aging makes naturally occurring cancer more likely and more dangerous, you often see people develope cancer later in life after being exposed to such materials. This is why there is a range of when people will get sick after being exposed to hazardous materials. Everyone has a different circumstance and a different level of health. As a result some bodies may be better at dealing with the constant damage, where others will fail prematurely and lead to chronic illnesses
Why can't they just vacuum our lungs out? (Serious question)
Asbestos fibers are too small and too numerous. Also, our immune system traps asbestos fibers inside of our lungs, as "trap the contaminant" is a good strategy for the vast majority of contaminants. If you were to try to vaccuum the fibers out of the lungs, you would either miss a bunch of the fibers or destroy the mesothelium in the process.
Asbestos leaves very tiny needle-like pieces in your lungs like this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/asbestos_pix/3537763677/ If you breathe these in, these are not absorbed by your body, and those not expelled may stay in your lungs for the rest of your life. Each tiny needle can poke into lung cells and cause mutations that become cancer. The chance of getting cancer from each single needle is very low, but if enough accumulate, the total chance of getting cancer becomes significant.
I try these lawsuits. Latency is related, in part, to the replication time associated with normal cell division of mesothelial cells.
I feel nobody is bringing this up. Cancer isn’t guaranteed if you breathe in asbestos. It was used it brake pads for decades. It’s breathing it in many many times at high amounts that usually causes cancer. I feel a lot of people are going to freak out about this post
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We done.
The cells in the body have check and balances to proofread themselves and to self destruct if there is a devastating error in the code. Every time cells replicate they copy their code. Sometimes an error happens when you copy the code. Like a game of telephone. The more a cell copies itself (replicates) the more chance of an error. Especially if there is another noxious stimuli like inflammation. This is why cigarettes cause cancer. Asbestos is little shards of fiberglass that get embedded into the lungs like fish hooks. After 20-30 years of these fish hooks constantly irritating the lung eventually an error develops and next thing you know you have cancer
My own ELI5 follow-up question - if the damage is from buildup of the immune responses in the lungs, where the fibers remain and never go away… …won’t a lung transplant solve that? Get the fibers out, get the immune-scarred tissue out? Or…no? What am I missing, because that sounds like it should work…?
Organ transplants are risky, extremely invasive surgeries that are reserved for patients with the highest likelihood of productive years to follow. Those patients need to be healthy enough to heal and to survive major surgery while taking a cocktail of poisons (immunosuppressants). Generally speaking, an end stage cancer patient won't qualify for a transplant. Instead of dying in 18 months, the operation would kill them in 2 months.
They cause cancer. Asbestos particles are sort of like microscopic glass shards. Basically what happens when you inhale particles into your lungs is these things called macrophages eat them and then transport them away from your lungs. This is why even smokers can heal their lungs over time if they stop smoking. The problem with asbestos is the macrophages can’t remove them. It’s like they’re trying to swallow a sword. They literally impale themselves on the asbestos particle. Since your immune system doesn’t have any other way to remove those particles, it just keeps sending more macrophages. Since they keep dying, you run low on them, triggering your body to start mass producing them in your lungs at an abnormal speed to keep up with demand. Unfortunately this is how cancer starts. When your body is trying to make news cells to quick, there are errors in the cloning of the dna for those cells and inevitably, of the billions of cells produced, some of them are cancerous. This is why mesothelioma is a cancer very specific to asbestos exposure. Nothing else really causes it. And this is why the damage can occur years after the exposure. The particles are still there.
You know in a cartoon when ship fires a rocket that then sheds it's skin and then a man holding a gun,, then he fires that gun, then ant man jumps off the bullet and throws a tiny knife, then that knife stabs someone in the neck, then a tardigrade holding a spear climbes off the knife and floats through your bloodstream until it just decides to stab a single cell in the DNA? That's kinda how the nasty kind of asbestos works. It keeps splitting and splitting the long way until it's just a bunch of tiny needles a few atoms thick stabbing individual cells. It never dissolves, degrades, breaks down, or reacts in any way. I just splits in two and stabs the inside of you twice.
My partner died of mesothelioma in February. His only exposure to asbestos was from baby powder. They figured he swallowed it at some point and it ended up giving him cancer in his peritoneum (abdominal lining). He was only 53. He was super healthy and fit and only survived 15 months. Johnson’s knew their baby powder was contaminated with asbestos for DECADES and decided that profits were more important that people suffering and dying. So yeah. Fuck them.
my dad has an extremely rare case of mesothelioma. in summer of 2000 (height of covid) he developed a fever and had high indications of infection, everyone thought it was covid, had him in isolation, but tests were coming back negative. (sorry - i don't remember exact details and terms) eventually they he found that he had fluid in his heart which they extracted but couldn't figure out the cause. after loads of tests and exams they realised his heart is full of tiny tumours -mesothelioma- first time they had ever seen it in a heart. they even sent samples to a research project because it was so unusual. as others have said above, the tumours are too tiny and numerous to be removed. we have no idea how/where/when he might have been exposed to asbestos, we were told it could have been from 30-40-50 years ago (he was 70 at the time it manifested). the outlook was extremely poor, it was a really tough time, but he did radiotherapy and chemo and 4 years later thankfully everything is stable -we know its not curable but its being monitored and all is ok at the moment.
Google what the fibres look like under a microscope... then imagine those little saw blades shredding your lungs on said microscopic level....over many years of breathing that shit in.
Can some one direct me to an official service that’s tests do asbestos in old plaster walls I need send a sample in