This Podcast Will Kill You - Ep 118 Asbestos: Corruption and cancer and corporate greed, oh my!

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

An entire generation probably first learned the word “mesothelioma” and its link to asbestos from those ubiquitous commercials in the 1990s and 2000s. You know the one: “if you or a loved one has been diagnosed with mesothelioma you may be entitled to financial compensation.” These commercials made it seem like mesothelioma suddenly came out of nowhere. Was this a newly discovered disease? Wasn’t asbestos banned? How did asbestos cause mesothelioma? Heck, what even was asbestos? By seeking to answer all those questions and more, this episode picks up where those commercials left off. We detail how teeny tiny asbestos fibers can wreak immense devastation, untangle the long human history of asbestos products, and assess the current status of this fibrous mineral, which is disappointingly far from banned worldwide. No story of asbestos would be complete without a spotlight on the town of Libby, Montana, where brave crusaders continue to fight against a company whose callous negligence led to injury, death, and widespread environmental contamination. Tune in to find out where salamanders, The Wizard of Oz, Charlemagne, and The River Wild fit into the story of asbestos. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Santana won this tour 2026, the power, the energy. Come celebrate your favorite hits from Woodstock to Supernatural and Beyond with very special guest, the Doobie Brothers. Get tickets now at LiveNation.com. Santana and Doobie Brothers won this tour, 2026. In early 1996, Les had a cough that he just couldn't shake. He didn't think much of it. It had been a hard, cold winter, and he just figured he had a touch of bronchitis. But Gaila Benefield wasn't so sure.

She suggested that Les go over to see Dr. Whitehouse in Spokane. White House had already treated several people. from Libby. Finally, as much to get Gailoff as back as anything, Les made an appointment, and he and Nerita got into their 89 Dodge and took the five-hour drive over to Spokane one spring day in 1996. Less was a little embarrassed about the whole thing when he got there. He told the nurse, I don't feel sick. Alan Whitehouse put him at ease right away. He looked over Les's information and said, So you're from Libby, eh? Yes. Well, I've got a pretty good idea why you're here. You do? Yep. Take your shirt off. We're going to do a

chest x-ray and a breathing test. About 45 minutes later, White House came back into the room and leaned on the examining table and said, well, you've got active asbestosis. No hemming and hawing. Less recalled the doctor telling him he had between five and ten years to live. Less was stunned. He really didn't know what asbestosis was, but he knew he. he didn't feel bad enough to be dying. He hadn't worked at that mine for 35 years. How do you comprehend something like that? He took the inhaler and walked out to the front desk and said, send me a bill, and he and Nerita got in the car and started home. And he didn't say anything at all until they had gotten almost halfway home. He pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car

and shook his head. What's the matter, Narita said. By God, you know, I believe I just got a death sentence. Wow. Yeah. So that really sad snippet of a story, really, just a tiny little piece, is adapted from a book called An Air That Kills by Andrew Schneider and David McCumber. And Les in the story is a real person. His name was Les Graham's dad, and he was an outspoken activist and advocate for everyone affected by asbestos-related diseases. and he died on January 21st, 2007, at his home in Libby, Montana from Mesothelioma. And you'll hear more about Libby, Montana later on in the episode. Oh, I'm sure we will.

Mm-hmm. Wow. Yeah. Oh. I know. Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh. And I'm Aaron Alman Updike. And this is, this podcast will kill you.

And today we're talking about asbestos. Yeah, this is a topic that we've been wanting to do for a while, but I feel like we've been intimidated by just how much there is to cover and wanting to do it justice, which is impossible to do, really. It really is, yep. Yeah. We're going to fall short in some regards, but we're going to learn a lot together today. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be a very interesting episode. I'm really looking forward to understanding what the heck asbestos does to your body, because I really don't know. Ooh, and I really want to understand the history because I feel like it is going to be massive and a lot of drama. Infuriating. Yeah, really soul crushing for sure. Well, well, on that note. On those happy notes.

Yeah. Shall we? Is it quarantini time? It definitely is. What are we drinking this week? This week we're drinking unquenchable. Yeah. We're calling it unquenchable. because asbestos means unquenchable in Greek. It's like one of the words that lent its meaning to asbestos. You love that.

And what is in unquenchable? Well, we wanted to do something that resembled asbestos fibers, and I think the closest thing was cotton candy. Cotton candy, you'll never look at it the same. No. And it's cotton candy plus Prosecco and raspberry and some lime juice. And yeah, it's... surprisingly tasty for cotton candy containing drink.

Yeah, I think that is an accurate, an accurate representation of my feelings about this drink. We'll post the full recipe for that quarantini as well as our non-alcoholic plissy burrito on our website, this podcast will kill you.com and our social media channels. We certainly will. On our website, you can find all sorts of things such as transcripts for each and every one of our episode. You can find links to bookshop.org and Goodreads list. You can find links to our music by Bloodmobile to Patreon, to merch, to probably other things that are out there. Check it out. There's a lot to discover. This podcast Will Kill You.com. Loved it. Beautiful done, Aaron. Any other business that we must urgently attend to?

I really don't think so. I think the most urgent business is to get straight into the meat of this episode. so please, after this break, can you tell me about the biology of asbestos? Sure you can try. Dinner shows up every night, whether you're prepared for it or not. And with Blue Apron, you won't need to panic order takeout again. Blue Apron meals are designed by chefs and arrive with pre-portioned ingredients so there's no meal planning and no extra grocery trip. There, assemble and bake meals take about five minutes of hands-on prep.

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In literally the very first lines of the very first paper that I opened about asbestos, I learned things that I didn't know. So I was starting from a place of knowing absolutely nothing, clearly, about asbestos. Because as it turns out, asbestos is not one thing. That was news to me as well. News to me. It's an industry term.

Right. So I understood asbestos from a public health perspective prior to this exclusively. And from a public health perspective, I understood asbestos as like a fibrous material that was used a lot in construction that when inhaled can cause disease. And that's not entirely wrong, but as we'll see, it's not the whole story. Right. Historically, and this is not, I think, stepping on your toes because it's just a very brief intro, Aaron. But historically, asbestos has been used for super. many different things. And I know, Erin, you're going to get into that in more detail.

It's absurd. How many things? I, the Wicked Witch's Broome. Did you know that? I did know that. Covering playgrounds instead of grass. Uh-huh. It's incredibly heat resistant and fire resistant and resistant to corrosion. So it was used for fireproof suits, piping, insulation, housing insulation, roofing, flooring, cement, brake pads, like literally everything. Except for the fact that I think was is not the appropriate tense. Correct. It still is used in a very disturbing number of things in the U.S. and around the world, although many countries have banned it. But that's getting way ahead of ourselves.

We'll get there eventually. But it's not one fibrous thing. So what is it? At its core, asbestos is a mineral compound or multiple types of mineral compounds that are made of silicon and oxygen that naturally form into fibers, like fibrous substance. Kind of looks like cotton candy. Six of these specific minerals are grouped together under this umbrella of asbestos, and they are in many countries either banked and, now, or at least highly regulated. However, there exist hundreds of other minerals that also naturally exist in a very similar

fibrous state, and in many cases have also been shown to be carcinogenic to one degree or another, but are not regulated as asbestos because they, at least historically, haven't had a large amount of commercial usage. And like you mentioned, Aaron, asbestos is really a commercial or a regulatory definition. One example of this is Aryanite, I think that's how you pronounce it, which is also a fibrous mineral and is a known and recognized human carcinogen, but it is not regulated in the same way asbestos. It is not considered under this asbestos umbrella. However, Mineralogically, it's a very similar compound. That's interesting in terms of regulation and protection and what determines safe levels of exposure,

which is already a total mess, or at least historically, has been such an infuriating mess. Say it louder. Oh, we don't want to use this new high-powered microscope because that'll find more asbestos than we thought was there using our outdated 30-year-old technology. I love that we're already getting a glimpse into the history. I don't even talk about the whole like protocols for assessing asbestos exposure, but it is like a part of it that is Oh. Anyway, sorry. But in general, what we call asbestos can be broken down into two subgroups.

There is serpentine asbestos, which includes chrysotile, and that is by far the most widely used form of asbestos. This form of asbestos makes these longer curly fibers that are very, very versatile in their uses. If you look at them under like a scanning electron microscope, they look like these long curly tubes that if you cut them in cross-section kind of roll up like a scroll. Oh, most. Yeah. And then there's the grouping of amphibol asbestos, which includes five different forms. Actinolite, tremolite, anthropophyllite, crocodilite, and. amosite. And apologies if I pronounced any of those incorrectly. But all of these fibers tend to be

more straight and brittle and are usually described as kind of needle-like. They're still used a lot in commercial situations, but definitely less than chrysatile. But the thing is that even within these two kind of broad mineralogic classifications, serpentine and amphibbles, these kind of mineralogic classifications, there are a lot of other fibrous materials that are not regulated as asbestos, even within those two categories. So it's a lot, and I find it very interesting. Yeah. Yep. The major determinants of the toxicity of any of these forms of asbestos is the fiber dimension itself, like how wide, how long, et cetera, and the biopersistance, how long do these fibers just hang out either in the environment or in our lungs, which we'll get to. And then, of course,

dose and duration and things like that. In general, the amphibal types of asbestos have been shown to be more pathogenic and more carcinogenic than the chrysotiles. However, those are used much more frequently, right? And, and, don't get me wrong, all forms of asbestos as well as many other similar mineral compounds are pathogenic and carcinogenic. Right. So anyone who says they're not, is not telling the truth. Okay. I can tell by your face that we'll get there. We will. So let's talk about what the actual health effects of asbestos are, shall we? Mm-hmm. At its core, the reason or the mechanism by which asbestos causes disease is that we inhale these teeny, tiny little fibers into our lungs.

These fibers, even though when you have a big clump, it might look like cotton candy, the actual individual fibers themselves are like microns or tenths of microns long. We're talking very, very small, invisible to. the naked eye when you breathe them in. We're inhaling them into our lungs and then they simply stay there. Some, like the chrysotile, are longer. So they might get stuck in places in our lungs that are a little bit higher up or we might even maybe sometimes be able to breathe some back out. But many, including the very short or needle-like varieties, can penetrate very deeply into our lungs and then stay there. So that's part of why the pathogenicity is the actual biopersistance. How deep are these getting into our lungs, which the fiber length and size is going to play

into, and then how long do they stay there? Okay, so when you say how long do they stay there, does our immune system play a role at all in breaking them down or isolating them or anything like that, or do they just stay there forever? Yeah, that's a great question. Our immune system plays a really big role, but as we'll see, it's largely just in causing inflammation from these just staying there. Okay, so it's like, I know there's something there, but I can't do anything about it, and I'm angry and inflamed.

One thing that can happen is our immune system can form these, what are called, asbestos bodies, where macrophages and things kind of try to wall off. these little asbestos fibers. But again, that can just be anitis for more chronic inflammation. Okay. So let's get into the different types of diseases that we see with asbestos because, spoilers, if you didn't realize this, it's not just one. Asbestos can cause two different classifications of diseases, cancers and non-cancers.

And these are not mutually exclusive. and many times the non-cancerous form of asbestos can develop into cancer later in life. But in terms of the non-cancerous disease, the major one that we see with asbestos is called asbestos, pretty aptly named. And this comes from usually long-standing exposure to asbestos. I really tried to get a handle on quantifying this, like how much asbestos do you really need to be exposed to? I could not get a good answer for this, Erin. I'm not surprised, really. Yeah, I'm not either once I really started thinking about it, but it just was disappointing, I think.

So if you couldn't get info on how much asbestos causes asbestosis, what are the diagnostic criteria for asbestosis? Yeah, let's talk about what it actually looks like, shall we? Yeah. So asbestosis looks and is really very similar to a pretty generic disease called interstitial pulmonary fibrosis. This is a lot of inflammation in the lungs, a lot of scarring. And this type of scarring happens kind of in between areas in our lungs, like in between the alveoli and in between places where your oxygen. is supposed to be diffusing into your bloodstream. So what this results in is decreased capacity for diffusion. You can't get air to actually cross from the lungs into the bloodstream.

So this is what is called a restrictive lung disease. It's the opposite of what we were talking about with bronchialitis, which is obstructive, right, where you can get air in, but you can't get it out. Here, your air is not getting in as well, or at least it's not. diffusing the way that it is supposed to. Okay. So people have shortness of breath, often a pretty dry cough. On an x-ray or a CT scan, you can often see this pattern called honeycombing because the spaces between, you know, little air sacs and things get thickened so you can see those scarred,

inflamed areas more prominently. Gotcha. None of this is specific to asbestos or asbestosis. but so you asked how do you actually then make this diagnosis it would be seeing all of these symptoms and then asking have you ever worked around asbestos have you ever had any exposure to asbestos that you know of and someone who had that history you might think this could be caused by asbestos and then if you were to do a biopsy you would actually be able to see the asbestos fibers existing still in the lungs and asbestos bodies like I mentioned in addition to all of these inflammatory changes.

Okay. How often is that biopsy done? And how is the treatment different if it's asbestosis versus another cause of this pulmonary fibrosis? Great question. So the biopsy can be done via like a lavage. So you don't have to necessarily puncture lung tissue. Okay. It doesn't have to go from the outside.

You can do it through bronchoscopy where you're putting like a tube down into the lungs, looking there, and then putting fluid in and kind of washing the area. Okay. And we do that for a lot of different things. But so you would be able to see asbestos fibers and asbestos bodies in that what's called a bronchial alveolar lavage. And you could potentially take additional biopsies too if you needed to. In terms of treatment, it doesn't differ than any other treatment for interstellarge. pulmonary fibrosis or a lot of other kinds of restrictive lung disease, really. And that is that we don't have very good treatment for it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that is the kind of non-cancerous,

major non-cancerous disease that we see with asbestos, asbestosis. But of course, asbestos is a known carcinogen, carcinogen being substances that are known to cause cancer. And the biggest buzzword, which you heard in our first-hand account, and most people probably associate with asbestos, is mesothelioma. Do you remember, Aaron, the legal company infomercials about mesothelioma? Oh, yeah. I feel like I don't see those anymore, which is interesting. I feel like I just watch TV on subscription services, so that's maybe part of it for me. I just pay for the cheap ones where I still have ads on my Hulu.

But, yeah, the reason that this association is so strong in so many of our brains is because the vast, vast majority of all cases of mesothelioma are caused by asbestos. In fact, one of the papers that I read said that the only other generally recognized causes of mesothelioma are Aryanite exposure, which, again, that's a very similar compound. Asbestos adjacent. Exactly. And that's from like endemic exposure in places where that's naturally occurring. Okay. Ionizing radiation when people were exposed to very specific types of contrast and chest injuries. Huh.

So without asbestos, mesothelioma would be an incredibly rare cancer. But what actually is it? What is this? Yeah, yeah. mesothelioma is a cancer of linings. It is a cancer of the lining of our lungs called the plura or the lining of our abdomen called the peritoneum, or in some rare cases, lining of our heart or the lining of the testes, which is called the tunica vaginalis. So it's a cancer of the therosa. That's a word that we actually just talked about in our lupus episode.

specifically within our cirrhosa there are cells in this lining that are called mesothelial cells and so cancers are usually very boring and called after the type of cell that they come from so that's what a mesotheloma is the mesothelial cells in our cirrhosa are plura our peritoneum they're what make our insides slippery and allow them to move well across each other the serosa lines both, for example, our lungs and our chest wall and allows your lung to move freely against the chest wall without any irritation, inflammation, etc. So that is what a mesothelioma is.

It's a cancer of the lining of something, and most often are lungs. Okay. In the cases of asbestos-associated mesothelioma, it tends to be the plura. Very often it's the plura. It certainly can be the peritoneum as well. Okay. Because while inhalation is the most common root of exposure, you can also be exposed via water, you can be exposed via soil. And so this isn't something that's limited to our lungs. Right. Okay. But mesothelioma is a generic term that could mean mesothelium of the plura, of the lungs, or of the peritoneum of your abdomen. Right. So it's kind of a little bit more generic than just lozotheloma. lungs. Yeah. So what we see with mesothelioma of the plura of the lungs is that people are going to present with a lot of difficulty breathing, as you can imagine, a lot of chest pain, especially pain

with deep inhalation, or chest pain that gets worse with inhalation. And when you look at imaging, like an x-ray or a CT, you see a lot of fluid built up around the lungs. This is called a plurias. effusion. If instead of being in the lungs, it's the peritoneum, the abdomen, you see similar things just in the abdomen, abdominal pain. Your abdomen is a lot more elastic than your chest wall. So you might see a lot of distension of the abdomen because of this fluid. And we call fluid in the abdomen ascites. And then depending on how bad it gets or how much tumor burden there is, you can end up with compression of things like bowels that could lead to a bowel obstruction. And because this is a cancer, this is tumor that we're talking about,

but it's developing on this structure that's very thin and kind of vast, right? Like it lines the entirety of our chest wall or the entirety of our abdomen. the amount of spread and invasion that we tend to see with mesothelioma by the time someone is symptomatic and therefore diagnosed is really extensive. How does asbestos exposure lead to mesothelioma? Excellent question. That's the key question, isn't this? As per usual, part of my answer is going to be that we don't fully know. Of course. Has to be. Has to be. But we do have kind of a lot of ideas.

These are fibers that are penetrating our lungs and causing a lot of irritation. They're causing a lot of inflammation. So we know that this can lead to things like asbestosis, like we already talked about. That's just sort of inflammation and irritation. Part of this inflammation itself can put you out. risk for cancers, right, of various forms. But in the case of asbestos, it also seems to have specific carcinogenic properties as well. And these are actually more varied than you might think. One thing that asbestos fibers actually seem to do is disrupt the mitotic spindles of cells,

like physically break the mitotic spindles, which are necessary for the process. of mitosis or cell division. So it's thought that this physical disruption can result in chromosomal damage during mitosis while our cells are trying to replicate. Okay, so it's just like putting a wrench in the whole cell replication process. That's one of the ways, yeah.

Asbestos also seems to induce a lot of reactive oxygen species formation that additionally can cause further DNA damage, which can then put you at risk for cancer. We also see, in general, disregulated cell growth because of disruption of growth-factor genes. So there's a lot of kind of more specific cancer-causing genetic changes that we see after exposure to asbestos that we still don't fully understand. Gotcha. One thing that's interesting is that mesotheliomas specifically, especially in the lungs, tend to occur first,

on what's called the parietal surface. That's the body surface of that lining rather than the lung surface of that lining, since again there's like two of this linings. So it's thought that it's the asbestos fibers literally sticking out of the lung and scraping along that body wall side that's causing that repeated inflammation

and those other changes that we talked about. Oh my God, that is horrific. I know. I know. And mesothelialoma is a horrible cancer. Median survival has been and continues to be nine to 12 months after diagnosis. Wow. But that's not all because it never is. Because while we may associate asbestos with mesothelioma in our mind, asbestos also can cause and does cause any and every other type of lung cancer as well. This means squamous cell lung cancer, adenocarcinoma, large cell, small cell, as well as laryngeal cancer, ovarian cancer, possibly increases your risk of colorectal cancer and other cancers. In fact, it's estimated that asbestos exposure causes six times more lung cancer, as in other types of lung cancer, than it does mesothelioma.

Huh. And it's also estimated that lung cancer deaths are likely twice as great as mesotheloma deaths in relation to asbestos exposure specifically, because even though mesotheliuma is horrific, it still remains very rare, thankfully. Okay. Are there associations with certain types of asbestos and certain outcomes of asbestos or certain types of lung cancers versus mesothelioma, stuff like that?

It's a really good question. I found a paper that I'll link to that tried to really quantify cancer risks for both lung cancers and mesothelioma by fiber size. And the truth is that we just don't have enough data to actually, like, the end result of that was that no, not really. What it showed was that the chrysotile forms, which again are more common, do seem to be slightly less carcinogenic than the other like amphibal forms, but both of them are associated with significantly increased risks of mesothelioma and other lung cancers. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. And there are a lot of different ways, aside from just fiber size,

that people have tried to kind of really quantify the risk of asbestos exposure or the risks of various cancers after exposure. But there isn't an easy, clear, single answer. Like I mentioned, it depends on fiber type, it depends on the persistence and the size, but it also depends on dose, on duration, and then individual factors as well. Things like smoke or tobacco, backo exposure at the same time or in the same person, even further increases the risk of cancers because of additional damage to the lungs. And then we all have our own individual baseline cancer risk or genetic cancer risk that plays into this as well. There are papers that have numbers that exist, but they're not really great. And I don't think that they provide all that much

context. Yeah. The other thing about lung cancer and especially mesothelioma, is that the latent period is incredibly long after exposure. Why is it so long? Or is it just that we are not good at picking up one-to-one causes of cancers and other types of exposures, I guess? Does that make sense? Like, is this abnormally long or do we just not know the exposure for other cancers? Right, right. To know the latency period.

That's a really good question. Yeah, that's a really good question. I don't have a good answer to that. So I don't know if it is abnormally long or if it's just that we know this latency period. I hadn't thought about that, actually. I don't have an answer, but it's a really good question. But it is about 30 to 40 years or more, by the way, for anyone wondering how long long is. It's so long. It's very long, which means that we are certainly not out of the woods in terms of new diagnosis of a specific. related diseases, even though efforts have been made to reduce asbestos exposures. So, yeah, that's, I mean, that's asbestos. Maybe this is a question more for current events, but are there any medications or therapies that can reduce the damage caused by or reduce the asbestos burden in people's bodies who have been exposed?

Not that I was able to find or read about. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bummer. How do you know if you've been exposed to asbestos? If you don't know, right? Like, are there tests that can show before you develop asbestosis or before you develop one of these lung cancers into a biopsy?

Are there screenings that can say, yes, you have asbestos in your lungs and, you know, or is it just that you're seeking answers to a health problem that you've observed? All of us have been exposed to asbestos. All of us likely have asbestos in our lungs, like to one degree or another. Because asbestos is and has been so common. There are not screening protocols that are universal. Some countries have some screening guidelines in place for specific occupations and things like that. had very high levels of exposure to asbestos because of your occupational exposure. But none of that has been very well studied, and so it's not very well kind of fleshed out. There's a lot of

interest in this, especially because in recent years, we do have guidelines for general lung cancer screening as it relates to tobacco smoking. So we know that screening for lung cancer in people who have a history of a long-term smoke exposure can reduce mortality because we can catch cancers earlier, right? That's the point of screening. That data doesn't exist yet for asbestos. Could it in the future? Maybe, but it doesn't right now.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. So we may not have good numbers on how many asbestos fibers of this type or that type will cause cancer or asbestosis or whatever. But I feel like for a really long time, it was like, oh, you have to be an employee at an asbestos mine for 35 years in order to get any one of these things. And that's the only time that you're really at risk. But that is not the case. It's definitely not the case. Like I said, there's going to be a lot of individual variation in this. But because we have all

been exposed to asbestos and some people to greater degree than others. In theory, any exposure to asbestos can put you at risk for mesothelioma and other cancers. Some papers tried to put an estimate not necessarily on exposure, but just on the amount of asbestos, say, remaining in your lungs and the increased risk of cancer. And what they estimated was, for example, a two-fold increase in in risk of lung cancer if you were to do one of those lavages of the lungs and find between five to 15 asbestos bodies. That's that inflammatory reaction per milliliter of fluid. And that's a relatively low number. Yeah. But it's that's that's kind of at least the number that this paper cited. Okay. Yeah, it's just hard to get a real sense of it. Yes. And it's,

And it is going to vary so much person to person because not everyone who has worked even in, say, asbestos minds or worked with asbestos for their entire life is going to develop cancer. And then there are people who have been exposed maybe to just asbestos that was in their home that they didn't even know about and then end up with mesothelium or lung cancer as a result of it. Yeah. So, yeah, that's that's asbestos in a nutshell, a small one. Ah, yeah. So, Erin. Mm-hmm.

I cannot wait to hear everything about how we came to find this, what do you call it, mineral, I guess, these minerals, these commercial designation minerals, how we decided to start using them in all of these different ways, how we decided to, this wasn't a great idea? I want to know all of it. Yeah. There is a lot to this story. And so let's just jump to it right after this break. Anyone who works long hours knows the routine. Wash, sanitize, repeat. By the end of the day, your hands feel like they've been through something.

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This is Bethany Frankel from Just Be with Bethany Frankel. Listen, I have a bone to pick with these dog food brands calling themselves fresh, natural, healthy. Sounds great, but a lot of these quote-unquote fresh dog foods, your fridge are not even 100% human grade, which is why feed your babies, just food for dogs. It's good enough for big and smalls, my precious babies, so it's good enough for your babies, 100% human grade, real ingredients, beef, sweet potatoes, green beans, delicious. These are foods that you would want to eat, not that the babies would ever share. Just food for dogs is the number one bet recommended fresh dog food back by over a decade of

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Get tickets now at LiveNation.com. Santana and Doobie Brothers won this tour, 2026. Like I said, the history of asbestos is unsurprisingly huge. It spans thousands of years, encompasses the entire globe, whole books have been written about the legal aspects of asbestos litigation or moments in asbestos history, not to mention the health effects of asbestos and how we learned about them. So having to distill this entire history down into like an hour and a half, hour, whatever podcast, it's a little daunting because I know that I won't be able to do this entire story justice. And justice is certainly deserved, especially for those

who have suffered and continue to suffer from the corporate negligence that makes up a horrifyingly large portion of the history of asbestos. So what I'm going to do in the history section is present the history of asbestos in basically two parts. The first as a little tour, not comprehensive by any means, through the ancient history of asbestos up until about like the 1930s, 1940s or something. so, which is when the health effects really began to be widely recognized. In the second part, I want to take a closer look at why asbestos has earned this notoriety as an industrial killer

by taking us through the story of Libby, Montana, which is often described as one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of the United States. Have we talked about Libby, Montana in other episodes? I don't think so. So we've talked about in our arsenic episode, I think we made reference to the anaconda mine, which is in Montana. And then, of course, in Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, we talked a lot about the Bitterroot Valley. But I don't think we've talked about Libby Montana. I don't know why it sounds familiar. Like, I definitely don't know anything about Montana. I think you know more than you think. Nope. Less than you think. Less than you think. By the end of this history section, you'll know more. How about that? But let's start back at the beginning, back to when humans first began using asbestos, which turns out to be a lot longer ago than I realized. There is evidence of asbestos used in pottery in parts of Africa and in Finland dating back 4,000 years.

Wow. And homes in eastern Finland from this time were found to contain asbestos. packed into the crevices between logs, presumably for insulation. Wow. In ancient Rome, the wicks in the lamps used by the Vestal Virgins were made of asbestos so that they would burn forever as long as there was oil in the lamp. Oh my gosh, because it's fire retardant. Uh-huh.

What? That's so cool. Isn't that cool? And like we said at the very beginning of the episode, the word asbestos comes from the Greek, meaning unquenchable or inextinguishable. The Vestal Virgins, by the way, which I've heard about them, but I don't know, I didn't know what they were, they were priestesses of Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth. And so the constantly burning flame was especially symbolic for like this ever-burning

hearth flame fire. I can't tell you how much I now want an asbestos candle. Oh, my God. Don't think that's a great idea. It's not, but doesn't it sound cool? I mean, asbestos seem to hold such, like, magical power for so much of history. Wow. And I can see it.

It is, like, an incredibly impressive mineral. It is, yeah. Yeah. Charlemagne, who lived in the 8th and 9th centuries, allegedly had a tablecloth woven with asbestos, and he would use it as, like, a party trick to spill wine. or meat sauce or, I don't know, beats on it, and then you would toss it into the fire to clean it. And he would just then pull it out unscathed.

Okay, that's a cool party trick. Very cool party trick. Yep. There are also references to asbestos napkins that could be similarly cleansed by fire, which hints at another earlier name for asbestos, amiantus, meaning undefiled. Wow.

The uses of asbestos from ancient times through the 1700s range from like the sort of useful, such as in body armor, fireproof coats, shirts, gloves, sleeve ruffles. I love that because like sleeve ruffles must have been so prone to getting catching on fire. You're like, we can't get rid of the ruffle. We have to make it fireproof. Thinking outside the box. And also my favorite is, burial shrouds so that the ashes could be kept separate. Wow.

But then there were the more inventive but not necessarily practical uses, such as the quote-unquote Book of Eternity, which was a book that people wanted to make whose pages were made of asbestos, so couldn't be destroyed by fire. Okay. To things that were purely just for show, like Benjamin Franklin's purse made of asbestos fiber, which you can see if you go to the Natural History Museum in London. Wow. And I've seen a picture of it.

And it is, I have to say, it is a hideous little thing. Like it's not good looking, right? And there was something about, oh, he didn't want to burn a hole in his pocket with the money. So he, like, wanted to save money, something to that effect. Oh, that's ridiculous. Yeah, super ridiculous. But throughout history, asbestos maintained. global popularity with minds all over the world. Despite this, global popularity and the existence

of minds everywhere, there seems to have been a bit of confusion over where asbestos came from. And somehow, people either forgot that it came from rocks or the alternative explanation was just too good. It was just too magical and too fun. Which was that? that, asbestos grew as hair on fire-resistant salamanders. Like in Frozen 2. Is there a fire-resistant salamander? Yeah, there's a little salamander who, like, his butt, he goes, poof, and then he catches on fire and then runs around and said, I've seen it too many times.

It's exactly that. So, like, that's amazing, because I had no idea, but apparently salamanders had this reputation for being fireproof. Huh. The etymology of salamander is not fully resolved, but it may come from the Persian, meaning fire within, or from the old French, legendary fiery beast. Oh my gosh. That's fascinating. And so the idea behind this, or at least one of the proposed ideas as to why it has his reputation, is that some species live in damp logs. And so if you toss that log onto a fire, it may burn for a bit before it gets too hot in the salamander with the reddish.

run out and it's like, whoa, this thing just came from the fire. It's fireproof. Got it. Oh, cool. I mean, maybe, who knows. But yeah, this was a very common myth, not just the fire resistant salamander, but that hair grew on these fire resistant salamanders, and that's where asbestos came from. That's so interesting because, like, it's just, you just mine it. Do you just mine it? I don't, I don't know, but as best is. Someone was clearly mining it way back then. I think it's just like it is a more fun, it is a more fun explanation. People called asbestos salamander wool or salamander cotton for a long time. And yeah, people did try to dispel this myth, such as Markle Polo, who around 1,300, wrote about an asbestos mine that he saw.

Quote, towards the northern boundary of this province is a mountain with a vein. with a vein from which is produced salamander. You must understand that this is not a beast, as is commonly asserted, but its real nature is such as I will now describe. It is a well-known fact that by nature no beast or other animal can live in fire. And so he's calling as best as salamander, which kind of is also confusing. Right. But he's like, no, it's not an animal.

It is a thing that you find in the mountain. Right. It comes, it's in this rock. It's just a thing in the rocks. You can take it out of the rocks. It's not alive. Yeah. Yeah.

And then he goes on to explain the mining process and how you turn it into fibers and how you can burn those fibers and it comes out unscathed or whatever. And then he concludes with, quote, the account I have given you of the salamander is the truth. And all the other accounts that are put about are lies and fables. Strong words. End quote. But even after this, even after these strong words by Marco Polo, the nature of asbestos remained a mystery until about the 1600s. And the salamander imagery was linked with asbestos for quite some time. Later on, certain asbestos processing companies used it on their logos.

And I'll try to find one to post on social media. Oh, interesting. Anyway, the 1700s and the 1800s really saw a huge, increase in the popularity of asbestos. Again, with applications ranging from the ridiculous, like the so-called human salamanders, who dressed in asbestos clothes and roasted stakes by hand and did other types of tricks like that while standing in a fire. I don't know how that would have worked.

I don't. I'm not convinced that it did. I, you would still get really hot. Mm-hmm. I don't. Oh, humanity. Well, you know, things that people were writing about in the 1700s, you know, don't believe everything you read, period, especially from the 1700s. Just kidding. Then there were more practical inventions. One of the earliest successful asbestos businesses was founded by Giovanni Aldini, nephew of Luigi Galvani.

If you remember from our electricity. Yeah, exactly. He did the fraud. leg experiments. Was he the one who did the frog leg and then came to the exact wrong conclusion? Erin, that was... Oh, sorry. Like two years ago? I have no idea.

A year ago? It's impossible to say. Anyways, moving on. Aldini made fireproof apparel specifically for firefighters. Just kind of a cool idea. If only he knew. Not long after, fireproof theater curtains came onto the market. and were credited with saving quite a few lives. But asbestos really started its upward climb

in the Industrial Revolution, used in steam engines, in roofing material, combined with cement to make fireproof ships and electrical panels, in vinyl asbestos tile, brake linings, insulating material, the possibilities seemed truly endless. And most scholars point towards the 1860s and the 1870s as the beginning of the modern asbestos industry. As more and more products began to include asbestos and as demand for those products grew, asbestos mines and processing facilities kept popping up to provide all the asbestos the world market wanted. People loved asbestos. The 1939 World's Fair featured a booth just overflowing, Like it had asbestos everywhere, like actual asbestos, and a giant asbestos man.

It seemed like a magical substance. There was no end to how it could be used. And over the first half of the 1900s or so, it found its way not just in construction or insulating materials, like asphalt, paint, plastics, plasters, clays, fireproofing materials, clutch facings. It was especially important during World War I and World War II. but it also began to make an appearance more and more in everyday life to the everyday consumer. Let me just list a few of these items here. Oh dear. As a filtering agent for wine, beer, gin, pharmaceutical products,

asbestos was even used as a cigarette filter during the 1950s. I read that one and I went, oh, oh. Ooh. I... Yeah, in the 1950s, which, like, we already knew. Yeah, that it was no good. Gas mask filters, sewing threads, surgical threads, surgical dressings, blankets, mailbags, ironing boards, ironing boards, toasters, play sand, fake snow, toothpaste, baby powders. all in all around 3,000 to 4,000 commercial products.

So you mentioned the Wicked Witch of the West's broom. It wasn't just the Wicked Witch's broom. Oh dear. It was also the fake snow used in the movie, likely asbestos. Whoa. And the use of asbestos and the Wizard of Oz, that was hardly a one-off. Next time you watch It's a Wonderful Life, or actually many Christmas movies from that era,

keep in mind that the fake snow swirling around everyone on set was often a form of asbestos. That is, I have to say, it's just so interesting that something. And I think this goes back to the fact that like asbestos is not one thing, right? But that something with one name can be so many. different things. Yeah.

Right. And so that is something that, like, I didn't mention at the top of this history, but I am lumping asbestos altogether. Right. I mean, that's how it is lumped. It is how it is lumped. Yeah. Yeah.

And in that regard, it makes sense that it was used in thousands of commercial products and had so many different uses. And, yeah. And so given that it was so widely. used from the fake snow to toothpaste to filtering agents. You know, surely no one suspected that it could be bad for you because how could it still be used to such a degree? I've heard too many of your history sections to think that that's true for a second. You know, I'm just trying to make everyone just that much more cynical or realistic is how I like to look at it. Yeah. No. No.

So all of these products, or at least many of these products, were produced up through the 19, well, I mean today still, but I mean like the heyday was probably the 1940s, 1950s, somewhere around there. At the latest, by the 1890s is when people had started to recognize that exposure to asbestos, especially in occupational settings, could lead to diseases. of the lungs. Whoa. That is not a good look. No, I mean, far from it. In 1898, the lady inspector of factories in Great Britain, which like I want to know more about that entire title and that entire role and everything.

Same. I know, right? A future episode. Anyway, the lady inspector noted that disease seemed to be higher among asbestos textile workers, and the following year, a physician named Dr. Montague Murray treated a person who had, quote, an unusual fibrosis of the lungs. He didn't report on the case until seven years later during a meeting on compensation for industrial diseases when the patient that he had treated talked about how he was the only one still alive of the 10 that had worked with asbestos fibers.

Oh. All the others had died by the age. age of 30. The committee, upon hearing this story, did not recommend compensation because they couldn't rule out tuberculosis, which was very prevalent at that time and may have obscured the link between asbestos and health issues, more broadly speaking, especially lung diseases. But still. Still. Yeah.

About 20 years later, so we're talking in the 1920s or so, the word asbestosis, coined by Thomas Oliver, first appears in a series of medical papers examining the occupational exposure to asbestos. And this increased attention, along with a case of pulmonary fibrosis in a Glasgow asbestos worker, prompted a medical examiner named Edward Meriwether to see, quote, whether the occurrence of this disease in an asbestos worker was merely a co-oper. coincidence or evidence of a definite health risk in the asbestos industry. End quote. I'll give you one guess as to what he found. I can guess correctly. Yeah. Yep.

He found a, quote, definite occupational risk among asbestos workers as a class, end quote, with disability and death as possible and indeed likely outcomes from fibrosis of the lungs. This was in 1929. Oh dear. As a reminder, the Wizard of Oz was released in 1939. And asbestos production in the United States peaked in 1972. Oh. I laugh because otherwise you just cry.

Yeah. Yeah. That year, 775,000 tons. of asbestos were produced. In the U.S. alone. In the U.S. alone. Yeah. That is.

It's stomach turning. It honestly is like. Yeah. But that is, I mean, I knew that there was going to be, I knew this was going to be bad, but that, I mean. That alone. It gets so much worse. Oh, dear. Because we're going to do like case study style.

Oh, no. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Before we get there, let's head back to the 1930s when evidence for the harmful nature of asbestos continued to mount. So this guy, Meriwether, his findings did lead to some industry change because he especially noted that dust seemed to be a huge part of the problem. So he was like either minimized dust or you minimize your exposure to it and you reduce disease development.

And in the places that took him up on this, which was actually like a large part of the industry in Britain, this did lead to a decrease in. pulmonary asbestosis cases delayed, of course, because of the length of onset. But this was specific to Britain. This didn't happen in the U.S. because in the U.S., similar safety measures had not been widely adopted and would remain patchy at best or more like lip service than actually protective. Even after asbestos was shown to be associated first with lung cancer, so it was suspected to be associated with lung cancer in the 1930s and 1940s, and then shown definitively in the mid-1950s. And then that strong link with mesothelioma was shown in the 1960s.

Yeah, I'm not going to have any words for a lot of this because it's just so United States. Mm-hmm. And alongside the discovery of the link between mesothelioma and asbestos came the observation that it wasn't just workers exposed to large amounts of asbestos day after day for years on end who were getting sick and who were dying, but anyone who used asbestos products or lived near asbestos factories. In the 1960s or so, the great love affair with asbestos, at least for the general public, was over as television and newspaper reports highlighted the health risks of the substance. And faced with this backlash, the asbestos industry reacted by revisiting safety regulations.

Implementing new ones. Sure. And funding studies that would conclude that, oh, this amount of dust is perfectly safe. Well, this form of asbestos is perfectly safe. Those are the ones. Those are the ones. Those drive me up a wall. This playground full of asbestos rocks is perfectly safe.

Oh, dear. And, gee, asbestos is simply the greatest. And you should just trust us on this one because, like, we've done a lot of research and why would we lie to you, even if we're worried about our business failing? The callous deceit exhibited by the asbestos industry goes way beyond negligence. And there are 1,0001 stories that show this. But I am just going to briefly go through one. And that is the story of Libby, Montana. Okay, ready for it.

Libby is a small town, population 2775, as of 2020, very small town. Super small. Yeah. And it's located way up in the far northwest corner of the state of Montana. Okay. It's surrounded by gorgeous natural beauty, snow-capped mountains, lush forests, the Roaring Kootenai River. Have you seen the incredible movie The River Wild?

Nope. The rafting movie with Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon from the 90s? No, but now I must. Oh, fantastic. I mean, I haven't watched it in like 20 years, but part of it, for all you listeners who may have seen it, part of it was filmed nearby Libby, Montana. Libby is also, like I said, the site of what has been called one of the greatest environmental disasters in U.S. history.

According to a 2016 study, 694 Libby residents have died of asbestos-related diseases since 1979. And that's in a town of 2775, yeah. Oh, my goodness. Uh-huh. And that number, which is likely an underestimate to begin with, will continue to grow. to grow. Oh my gosh. What happened in Libby isn't a case of whoopsie, we had no idea asbestos was so bad for you, so sorry, it's not our fault. It is a case of deliberate concealment

of a company making decision after decision after decision to hide information from people to continue to knowingly expose them to deadly substances and to try to avoid any responsibility for doing so, all in the name of profit. I'm getting worked up. Okay. There is so, so much more to this story than I'm going to go into right now. And I encourage everyone listening to follow up to get the full picture. I used a few sources for this that I'll post on our website, but mostly I took from a book called An Air That Kills by Andrew Schneider and David McCumber, who are two journalists that played a big role in exposing the Libby scandal. And it's It's a great source for more details on this.

But I'll do the best I can right now. The asbestos situation in Libby, which had been known to residents and lived by residents for decades, started to gain national recognition in the fall of 1999 when an article about it was published in a Seattle newspaper. When the EPA got wind of this article and these outrageous, these seemingly outrageous claims that it made, they were incredulous. First of all, if there were this many cases of asbestos-related disease and deaths at the time, it was reported as 198 deaths, in this one tiny town, the EPA would have known about it. Secondly, the article was claiming that it wasn't just the minors that were getting sick and dying of exposure to asbestos. It was also their families, their spouses and children, as well as other members of the community who,

didn't have any direct connection to the mine. This had to be sensationalist journalism, but to find out just how much misreporting was going on, the EPA had to investigate the situation for themselves. Over the next couple of years, what they ended up finding was that not only were the reported numbers accurate, but if anything, the article barely scratched the surface of the horrific situation that had unfolded over the previous decades in Libby. Wow. The story begins, really, in the 1920s, when a man named Edgar Alley established a mine to produce a substance called vermiculite, which, when heated, expands greatly, making it useful in many different products, as insulation for buildings, in concrete,

in packaging to protect what you're shipping, in soil to keep it aerated, the possibilities seemed endless. At one point, I think it was around 1960, I read, that there were even experiments in Libby to see whether vermiculite could be added to animal feed or loaves of bread. What? Uh-huh. Turns out that the bread rose faster and got moldy more slowly. Stop it. Ay, aye, aye. Sometimes it's like, you don't need to do something just because you can. Mm-hmm. That's, they didn't stop to think if they should. Yeah, exactly. Okay.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. The vermiculite deposit in Libby was one of the largest ever discovered. And to give you some idea of just how huge, Libby produced up to 80% of the entire world's supply of vermiculite between the 1920s and 1990 when the mine closed. Whoa. Uh-huh. Now, on its own, vermiculite is non-toxic, but in Libby, vermiculite, sold under the name zonalite, was not on its own.

The vermiculite there was contaminated with a form of asbestos called tremolite, or tremolite actinolite, or Libby amphibalibal abestis. So like you said, Aaron, it was one of the more shorter, spikier fibers that are highly pathogenic. and highly carcinogenic. And when asbestos was found to co-occur with this vermiculite, it was called, quote, one of the largest deposits of asbestos ever uncovered. Oh dear. If we revisit the timeline of when asbestos-related disease was first recognized,

it shows us that by this time, so by the time that asbestos had been recognized to be present in this vermiculite, the occupational hazards of asbestos were well known, and the evidence would just continue to pile up over the years. And the asbestos industry was more than ready to deal with these findings by trying to keep anyone from knowing about them, of course. Starting in the 1930s, there was an industry-wide push to prevent any negative press about asbestos

by funding experiments on the condition that these companies maintain complete control over the reporting of the fines, by ordering trade magazines like asbestos magazine, it was a real thing, not to write anything about the health risks of asbestos, by making it a policy to not tell employees that they were working with a deadly substance. For instance, the president of Johns Manville, which was a major player in asbestos products, said that managers at another asbestos company were, quote, a bunch of fools for notifying employees who had asbestosis, end quote. And when one of those managers replied, quote,

do you mean to tell me you would let them work until they drop dead? End quote. The president of Johns Manville allegedly said, quote, yes, we'd save a lot of money that way. end quote It's like cartoonish how

villainous villainous, how evil these people were I really just have it was such a hard time relating like how how do you do that

how do people do that? How are you a human? Right you have no moral compass whatsoever I mean, wow. Any mention of the word cancer was dropped from any official documentation, and even providing respirators or protective clothing to employees working with the stuff was a huge no-no because it suggested that, hey, you should protect yourself against this stuff. This dust could be dangerous, and they didn't want to make any suggestion to that effect. And there was no question whatsoever that the dust was dangerous, especially.

in Libby. A state inspection of the Libby mine in 1956, when it was still the Zonolite company, showed that the asbestos content in the dust at the mine and mill ranged from 8% to 12%, which is huge. Like 8 to 12% of the air? Of the dust. Had... And it was a very incredibly dusty place. Yeah, 8 to 12% was asbestos. Whoa. The inspector recommended, of course, that improvements be made to reduce the overall dust levels as well as exposure to the dust by changing stuff like the ventilating systems and providing PPE. And he concluded his report warning that the disease would likely occur in employees who had continued exposure.

Pretty clear message, right? Yeah. Do this or your employees will get sick and die. But when he came back a couple of years later, nothing had been done. And when he came back a couple of years later after that, having made again those same recommendations, things still hadn't changed. If anything, the concentration of asbestos in the dust was even higher. How could the company simply ignore these reports if they're being done by a state inspector? Because there's absolutely no enforcement policies. Welcome to America.

Yep, not only that, there was an agreement between the mine and the state of Montana. The inspectors were only allowed to access the site to perform these inspections on the condition that the reports be kept confidential to mine management only. Uh-huh. Not only did Zonolite know about the dangerous levels of dust in the mine, They also had proof, proof that they themselves gathered, that asbestos exposure was actually causing disease in mine employees. In the late 1950s, mine management had x-ray screenings done of the entire workforce, and the resulting report by doctors showed that 82 workers out of the 130 screened had signs of lung disease.

Not one of them was informed. I'm sorry. Okay. Okay. I'm going to go into work. I'm going to get an X-ray. Why? I don't know.

They're not going to tell me. No one's going to tell me the answer. But turns out all of you have asbestosis. Yeah, except they weren't told that. They were just like, hey, free x-ray screenings. Hey, free physicals. We're going to do this every year and collect this long-term data set. We're not going to tell you about it.

Not going to tell you, not going to tell everyone, and hope this never gets out. I, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Yep, none of the workers were told, and nor were they told when the company W.R. Grace purchased Zonolite in 1963 and took over mining operations. W.R. Grace was fully aware of the asbestos content in the dust and the asbestos-related disease becoming more and more common in mine employees, but like zonolite, they choose to do nothing or worse than nothing. What could be worse than nothing? I'll tell you.

When Grace's corporate safety chief, Peter Kostick, was informed of these x-ray reports that had been done, he suggested that those with the most severe disease be reassigned to less dusty, less dirty jobs. Quote, if we minimize their exposure to dust, chances are we may be able to keep them on the job until they retire, thus precluding the high cost of total disability. Yep. Yep, yep, yep. Plus also, now let's bring in a whole bunch of new people who have had less exposure and expose them to the high levels of dust.

Let's not do anything about the dust. It's like, let's calculate how we can maximize disease and death in these people, but also use them until the end of their lives. Like parasites. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Eventually, some PPE was offered, but it was more lip service than anything since it got incredibly clogged with dust basically right away and people just wore them around their necks. And it was just like, I can't breathe in it.

Like there's no, I have to clean it all the time and it's, I'm getting it. Yeah. It's hard to imagine how this could get even worse or more evil, but it does. And I'm sorry that I keep saying this, but it just happens. because W.R. Grace also had evidence that asbestos dust from the mine found its way into the town itself, detectable, quote, in downtown Libby on many dry days, end quote, according to an internal memo. How much dust are we talking? In 1969, quote, 24,000 pounds of dust a day were expelled from the large stack on the dry mill. the dust was about 20% asbestos and had tested as high as 40%.

End quote. And the production of asbestos would continue to increase in later years, doubling even at some points. The asbestos contamination in homes, in laundry hung out to dry, in soil, and some of the most contaminated places were the Little League fields and playgrounds where vermiculite tainted with asbestos was spread intentionally. There are pictures of piles, huge piles of dust and children playing in them. It is heartbreaking and horrifying. It was on the clothes of minors who came home from work, not told that they were coated in a deadly substance as they hugged their children and spouse. Entire families in Libby developed asbestos-related disease from this constant exposure.

and W.R. Grace continued to secretly monitor lung disease in their workers, with a confidential report in 1969, concluding that, quote, although 17% of our one to five years service group have or are suspect of lung disease, there is a marked rise, 45%, beginning with the 11th year of service, climbing to 92% in the 21 to 25 years service group. that report ended with this ridiculous understatement. Quote, this suggests that chances of getting lung disease increase as years of exposure increase, end quote. It's more like a guarantee than it is suggestive of a relationship.

Like, what? Okay. Where was the U.S. government in all of this? That's too big of a story. for me to even go into, but not doing anything. Anything to protect employees, only to protect and bending to the will of industry. OSHA, the occupational safety and health administration, was created in 1971, in large part due to occupational exposure to asbestos and the incredible work done by Asbestos researcher Irving Selikoff. So why had an OSHA or the EPA?

or NIOSH looked into the mounting cases of asbestos-related disease and death in Libby. Well, they actually had. In 1980, with reports on the mine showing that levels of asbestos exposure were 100 times what OSHA then deemed to be safe. Now guidelines are even more stringent. And that workers were at risk of developing severe asbestos-related disease. Not only that, but that the quote-unquote common knowledge that disease could only happen after prolonged exposure, that was wrong. The report from 1980 read, quote, mesothelioma, a marker disease for asbestos exposure, has occurred in persons with exposures as brief as one or two days, and in persons with exposures as low as those found in the homes of asbestos workers and in the neighborhoods around asbestos' mines as best as product factories and shipyards, end quote.

Despite this, despite these reports, nothing seemed to be done about it. When investigators from the EPA began their investigation of Libby in 1999, 2009, 2001, they came across these reports showing that they were covering the same exact ground that other people at this organization had done before. Yet, for some reason, those 1980 reports were not followed up. Why? What was that reason? It's unclear. There is some speculation that politics played a role. W.R. Grace's CEO was super tight with Reagan, who was president at the time that the decision to follow up would have been made. And under Reagan, the Grace Commission was established to find ways to cut funding for the EPA. And so the Grace Commission ended up suggesting a whole bunch of

decisions for the EPA. And, you know, I will say that it seems unclear what those recommendations were or what those decisions were. But I don't think it's super far-fetched to imagine that they might have gone something like nothing to see here, Libby's fine. It's one of those things where a lot of people work at the EPA, work at OSHA,

work at NIOSH, because they're passionate about protecting people, protecting the environment, but their hands are often tied by whatever administration is currently making decisions, and those decisions can often be guided by

industry interests, rather than human interests because there's money in industry interests, but there's not in the everyday person. Yeah, it is. It's a really depressing kind of tightrope balance thing to think about when you start looking at cases like this, right? It's just, it's a, it's really depressing. Yeah. Even though nothing was done about those reports from. Libby from 1980, there were still these passionate people in the EPA and elsewhere fighting for the ban of asbestos products. And in 1989, the EPA did enact such a ban on the, quote, manufacture processing and selling of almost all products containing asbestos, end quote. I mean, and that was a huge triumph. That got national attention. What didn't get,

as much attention was when the ban was overturned within just a couple of years. 1991? 1999, yeah. Yep, yep. And I feel like many people might be surprised to learn that asbestos is far from banned in the U.S. And that the U.S. still imports and uses literal tons of asbestos every year. And it's been an ongoing battle. and in fact the Trump administration actively fought against regulating asbestos, and Trump himself

claimed that asbestos was quote unquote 100% safe, and that anti-asbestos movements were a conspiracy by the mob. Anyway, it's just another demonstration of something we're always saying on the podcast, which is that public health and politics are heavily intertwined. You can't separate them. By the mob, Erin. I know. I mean, like, it's absurd. The vermiculite asbestos mine in Libby closed in 1990, but the damage was far from over.

The lag time between exposure and disease was one component, but another was the enormous contamination that Grace left behind. Starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, former employees of the W.R. Grace Mine in Libby and family of those employees successfully sued the company to cover their mounting health care costs, and the company was ordered to clean up the asbestos contamination at the site of the mine. But the company fought everything, tooth and nail, including hiding funds and declaring bankruptcy so they wouldn't have to pay out or clean up. Classic. Yep. And if it weren't for the amazing efforts by activists such as Gala Benefield, they may have gotten away with it. In the early 2000s,

Libby was declared a superfund site to help prioritize its decontamination. And in 2009, for the first time in the agency's history, the EPA declared a public health emergency in the town to help provide health care assistance. It's a victory for those who have fought so long and so hard to hold W.R. Grace accountable for their actions that resulted in so many lives ruined. Lives ended far too soon and too painfully. But these activists, they never should have had to fight that hard and for that long. W.R. Grace knew what they were doing, and they knew the harm that it would cause, and they sacrificed the people of Libby, Montana anyway, in the name of corporate profits. Unfortunately, the story of

Libby, Montana is still unfolding as the diagnoses and deaths continue, and it's not limited to that small corner of the state. Asbestos contaminated vermiculite from Libby was shipped around the world without a warning label, because as they acknowledged, a warning label would lead to substantial sales losses, so we better not. It was shipped to at least 750 locations in North America and to countries such as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, England, Ireland, France, Germany, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia. Asbestos containing zonalite was used in insulation for millions of homes in the U.S. And in the 1970s, fireproofing using asbestos and vermiculite was sprayed on tons of buildings and skyscrapers, including the World Trade Center.

There's an ad from 1981 for asbestos fireproofing showing the Twin Towers with the line, quote, when life depends on it, you use. asbestos. I saw in one of the papers that I read they were mentioning detecting, like, how high the levels got of asbestos in the air in New York after the collapse of the World Trade Center. Yeah. Yeah. One EPA chemist who tested the dust after the World Trade Center found that, quote, the concentrations of asbestos in settled dusts inside homes in Libby is comparable to the settled dust inside the buildings in lower Manhattan. But the message was, let's get Wall Street back up and running. Come on back. We got to do this. Once again, profit, corporate profit is more

important than human lives and health. There is no telling how many people around the world have gotten sick or have died from exposure to Libby asbestos. And W.R. Grace is certainly not alone in putting profits before the health of their employees, not in terms of asbestos or tons of other toxic substances. And this, honestly, this could be an entire podcast where we talk about corporate negligence and how so many companies don't care about their workers and continually expose them to things. And you could just do a whole series on asbestos because there are so many more stories out there. But the story of Libby and of asbestos overall is still unfolding. It's still happening as we speak. And so now I'll hand it over to you, Aaron, to bring us up to

speed a bit on the current asbestos situation, which is, I know, a tall order. Yeah, I will try my best right after this break. As of 2016, which is the most recent numbers that I found, 67 countries around the globe have banned all forms of asbestos. As you mentioned, Aaron, and because many of our listeners are U.S.-based, as are we, the United States is not one of those. The partial ban on manufacture-import processing distribution of some asbestos products that was enacted in 1989 was overturned in 1991, and since then, from what I can tell, all we have in the United States are some cobbled together, federal and local laws that have varying degrees of regulation on asbestos. And that's kind of it. From what I could gather, 2019 was the first time, at least recently, that the EPA has

proposed further restrictions. In 2022, they proposed a further ban on the use of chrysotile asbestos for all ongoing uses. Again, this is the most common form of asbestos. And as of March 2023, which is when not only we're recording, but also most recently that the EPA has updated this website, this ban, which would be pretty comprehensive, is still just a proposed ban. As far as I can tell, it's still open for public comment, and it's not, like, it has not been enacted at this point. Okay. In contrast, everywhere in the EU, all of the EU member states, banned all types of asbestos as of 2005.

And many of them had banned it earlier than that. So the World Health Organization, unsurprisingly, has a very big push, effort, desire, to reduce or eliminate asbestos-related diseases. That's kind of the angle with which the World Health Organization, of course, is going to come at it. But we have such a long way to go. Yeah.

According to the World Health Organization, 125 million people worldwide are exposed to asbestos at their workplace, and they estimate that fully half, one half, of all occupational cancer deaths are attributable to asbestos. And on top of that, several thousand deaths annually are attributable to household asbestos exposure. That's a lot. Yep. Most estimates that I saw from as recently as 2014 and 2016 are that we still consume between 1.3 and 2 million tons of asbestos around the world every year.

And for comparison at the peak in like I think it was the 1970s of overall global consumption, our peak was about 5 million tons annually. Oh my God. So it's like barely dropped. Right? That's at one hand I was like, well, it's dropped, but not that much. Like 1.3 to 5? Like, gosh, I would have hoped it'd be better than that.

I mean, yeah. But as long as someone is making money off of producing asbestos, it's, mm-hmm. I know. I know. I know. In terms of additional numbers on how many people are affected by this, it's estimated that if we look just at asbestosis, so not even accounting for cancer-related deaths, 2017, it was estimated that over 3,000 people died from asbestosis worldwide. Mesothelium, it's a little bit hard to get total numbers on, but in the U.S., between 1999 and

2018, there were almost 50,000 new cases of mesotheliuma, of all types of mesotheloma that were diagnosed. And again, almost all of these are as a risk. result of asbestos exposure. And then when we look at lung cancer, because again, asbestos is causing more lung cancer than it is mesothelioma specifically. Lung cancer is in some countries the leading cause of cancer-related deaths. In almost all countries, one of the top causes of cancer deaths, as well as a top cause of overall mortality worldwide with over 2 million cases diagnosed every year.

And we really don't understand how much of that lung cancer burden is attributable to asbestos exposure. We really don't have a handle on those numbers because lung cancer is so multifactorial. Right. And I think that part of what really irked me in my, I mean, you explained a lot of things that were like really infuriating, Erin, about this story of asbestos. But I think especially when it comes to mesothelioma and the way that we view it in relation to asbestos or the way that we view asbestos in relation to disease is that a lot of papers when they're talking about the burden of asbestos and the costs of asbestos focus on the economic burden.

as it relates to compensation for exposure. So an article from the New England Journal of Medicine from 2005 predicted the total economic burden of malignant mesothelioma as it relates to compensation for asbestos exposure is up to $200 billion in the United States and $80 billion for Europe. And like just even using that as a metric, it just tells you how incredibly corrupt the system was and remains in terms of the amount of negligence for workers and humans who are just exposed to asbestos even outside of an occupational setting. Right. It's depressing. Yeah, that is a really interesting framing. I know that we often have a little bit of a, I don't really like that when things are talked about in terms of the economic burden.

But this seems especially not representative of the problem of asbestos. I don't know. Right. I'm trying to articulate how I feel about it, but it's not good. Because it's not even just the direct, like, health care-related costs. Right. Of a disease. We're talking about, you know, compensation.

for known exposures that were in fact negligent or worse than negligent. And then it's, of course, we always overlook the personal burdens, right? The people who are living with this or who are living, having known that they've been exposed. And what does that mean? Because we don't know. What does that mean if you are exposed and for how much of your life and to what degree? and we don't necessarily have screening protocols in place. So it's, yeah, it's really tragic, I think.

Yeah. Like in Libby, people who have been diagnosed with an asbestos-related disease and are wondering if they're children who played on these baseball fields, who played in these dust piles of asbestos, like, are they going to get diagnosed? And a lot of them have been. Right. And how long do you wait?

How long? What do you check for? And yeah. Yeah. So in terms of where do we kind of go from here, I don't have a great conclusion. Unsurprisingly, there's a very big push from a lot of organizations, both globally and locally in various countries, to further regulate or ban, in fact, all forms of asbestos on a global scale. Mm-hmm. I will also say that there is a lot more that needs to be done to understand the actual mechanisms of carcinogenesis, both for mesothelioma specifically, but also for all the other types of cancers that asbestos can cause.

And then I also will say that I do have a paper if people are interested in where we stand with the treatment of mesotheloma specifically, because that is also a pretty depressing state of affairs. I mentioned that the median survival after diagnosis with mesothelioma is nine to 12 months. That hasn't changed. And so there's, I think, a lot to be done as well in terms of treatment for mesothelioma. Because, again, this isn't something that is going anywhere anytime soon. Yeah. So that is kind of where we stand with asbestos and asbestos-related cancers today. Okay.

Yep. Yep. Sources? I don't know. I don't know what else to say, honestly. Yeah. I have many sources for this. I'll shout out again the book, an air that kills, if you want to read more about Libby, Montana.

And for the history of asbestos overall, I have a lot, but I'll shout out one by Tweedale from 2002 titled Asbestos and its lethal legacy. I also had a lot of papers for this one. One of my favorites actually was a report by the International Agency for Research on Cancer from 2012. That is very long and includes a lot of things other than asbestos, but they had a whole section on asbestos that I found really helpful. As well as a Lancet article from 2005 that was specifically titled Malignant Mesopotos. isothelioma that was specific to mesotheloma. There are honestly so, so many more, though, for any deep dives that you want on any specific aspect of asbestos or cancer or mesotheloma or the current status. So we will post all of our sources for this episode and every one of our episodes on our

website, this podcast will kill you.com. We certainly will. A big thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes. And a big thank you to Liana Squalachi, our wonderful mixologist for these episodes. Can you say that? Mixologist, is that right? Sure. Or is that drinks, I don't know. I think it could be widely applied, however you want to use it.

Or sound mixologist. There we go. And thank you, too. Exactly right. And thank you to you, wonderful listeners. We really appreciate you listening. Hope that you enjoyed this episode. Yeah, it feels weird.

sometimes to say enjoyed this episode, but we hope that you learned something this episode. We hope that you feel as infuriated as we do. Yeah. And as always, a huge thank you to our wonderful, generous patrons. Seriously, you are amazing. Thank you. We love you. We love you.

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