It is the big asbestos racket, with customers paying millions of pounds or euros for unnecessary removal of the banned material, and European Union legislation is party to it.
Asbestos has been called the leading occupational-related disease killer in the western world by the Health Protection Agency, and there is no doubt that some varieties of the substance the Greeks called unquenchable fire is responsible for lung cancer, asbestosis and mesothelioma, cancer of the lining that surrounds the heart, and one of the most painful and aggressive forms of illness known to man: it is almost invariably fatal and caused solely by asbestos exposure.
But the main, once most frequently mined variety of asbestos, Chrysotile, is almost completely harmless; this banned – but useful material – which sits in millions of homes and offices, is at the centre of a great swindle involving lawsuits, trumped up survey dangers, expensive removal palaver.
It is, as campaigner John Bridle, of Asbestos Watchdog UK, whose advice has saved dozens of companies – including Anglican churches - from asbestos ruin , the greatest swindle of our time.
But why was chrysotile banned in Europe in the first place? The answer in two words: bad science.
David Bernstein, a soft-spoken American ticologist living in Switzerland, was first asked to look into the real science behind chrysotile back in the late nineties, when it was already becoming apparent that chrysotile was on its way out. He had had a life time in toxicology, with several achievements.
And this issue piqued his interest:
“The reputation of asbestos couldn’t get any worse; so it was a challenge to my professional curiosity. Were all asbestos varieties – specifically chrysotile - really as bad as it was made out?”
Asbestos is a commercially convenient way of grouping together the only naturally occurring mineral fibres, magnesium silicates; there are three main varieties, of which chrysotile, white asbestos, is one, the other two are amosite, brown asbestos, and crocidotile, or blue asbestos,, these two have more “Powerful” properties – the fibres are longer and tougher - , but all three have the same uses, and their appearance when extracted from the rock of the colours of the names is similar. Mineralogically, they are distinguished by the principal metal in the silicate, magnesium and iron respectively,
Asbestos is a naturally occurring, stringy minerable fibre “angels’ hair” which occurs naturally in seams of rock; when rocks are broken out, pulverised and filtered away with meshes, you get the fibres. The stuff has been known since antiquity for its magic combination of properties: tensile, heat and acid resistant, incredibly strong, yet as weavable,
The ancient Greeks and Romans used it in lamp wicks of the “eternal flames of the vestial virgins”, funeral dress from the cremation of kings and in napkins that could be cleaned by being thrown into the fire; its fibres were used to strengthen clay pots and insulate suits of armour. Charlemagne had asbestos table cloths. After visiting a mine in the 13th century, Marci Polo was able to report that the fibres came from stone, not the wool from lizards as previously believed. But already Pliny the Elder warned of its health risks of the slaves who had sickness of the lungs, but they were in such awe of the asbestos’s seemingly magical properties that they ignored its symptoms.
Commercial manufacturing began in the 1880s with the creation of open pits in Canada and Russia, and elsewhere: Reports of its dangers in antiquity had been forgotten. As the material began to on an industrial scale, its insulating, heat resistant, incredibly strong properties made it become appreciated as indispensable acoustic and thermal insulator – in fire curtains in theatres to roofing felt; added to caulking, adhesives, acoustical plaster, ceiling tiles, cement and electric wire insulation, sprayed fire-proofing products.
In all it is estimated that it was used in over 3,000 products; production peaked in the 1960s and 70s, when millions of tonnes were imported into Europe. But soon the alarm bells started to ring. As early as 1897, an Austrian physician was convinced that dust inhalation was the cause of "emaciation and pulmonary problems in asbestos weavers and their families." At about the same time, the Lady Inspector of Factories in Great Britain recommended the installation of "a scheme of applied ventilation" to minimise the accumulation of dust.
An article in The Lancet in 1934 presented evidence of a link between asbestos and lung cancer. Dr. Richard Doll's landmark paper: Mortality from Lung Cancer in Asbestos Workers (1955) found that the incidence of lung cancer among men at a Turner & Newall asbestos factory in Rochdale was ten times the national norm. Rates of mesotheliomia, an irreversible and rare cancer of the linings of the lung which results from the inhalation of asbestos fibres over an extended period, grew rapidly and asbestos was discovered to be the only known culprit.
Estimates from deaths from asbestos related disease in the UK – which has a population of 60 million – vary from anything between 90,000 and 500,000 people over the next thirty years. To make a comparison, the lower range estimate is equivalent to the number of people who die in traffic accidents every year. The health and safety executive estimates it is the single greatest cause of work-related deaths in the UK.
As awareness of the harm caused by asbestos has risen, measures have started to be taken.
First of all, there were strict health and safety rules introduced for workers; maximum exposure levels were set and controlled. And the stuff has been phased out. New production, import and the use of Crocidolite, or blue asbestos, whose needle-like fibres were the strongest and most acid resistant of all, was used in yarn and rope lagging and its high bulk density made it suitable as spray-on insulation; imports peaked in 1950; restrictions governed its use from 1969; it was banned in 1985. Then there was amosite, or brown asbestos, whose harsh, spiky fibres had good tensile strength and were resistant to heat. It was banned in 1986. Then chrysotile, the most flexible fibre, as weavable as cotton, often used as reinforcement in asbestos cement, responsible for ninety percent of historical production – though much smaller proportion of the asbestos in the ground – was banned in several European countries before receiving a Europe-wide ban by EU directive in 1999, to which all members had to and did comply by 1 January 2005, including the new member states. Chrysotile is still in use for new applications outside Europe, notably the US and Asia – although the EU has pushed for a global ban. It is to the ban on chrysotile that we will return.
There is a vast amount of asbestos about – in the housing and business premise stock; and the current situation in the UK is that, left undisturbed, the asbestos causes minimal harm. It is only when torn up that the fibres enter the air passages that it can be dangerous – according to the Health and Safety Executive. With homes it is up the owner what he wants to do – though you might be sitting just metres away from a source. Since 2004, all business premises have to undergo an asbestos survey; this can cost hundreds of pounds. And then, if the surveyors estimate the asbestos poses a risk to health, likely to come loose, it may have to be removed,, at a cost of millions.
This, according to John Bridle, is where the corruption starts.
Ninety percent of all asbestos in use is chrysotile. Early surveys estimated it as dangerous as the other two. For instance, Davis (1978) exposed rats to a rather harsh regime: he took compacted blocks of asbestos, ground them with a so-called hurricane grinder, for days at a time, then, aerosolized it by blowing a fan through a passage past the noses of caged rats. He did this with all the major asbestos types and the results were similar. After a seven hour, five day a week, 12 month a year regime, between 25 and fifty percent of the rates had developed lung tumours – all this at exposures very much higher than a human being would endure. Bit still, indicative, no?.
But this science is flawed says Bernstein. Nothing was known then about the importance of fibre length, and fibre length distribution, and how to set up the experiment to avoid contamination. Microscopes were less advanced then. There was less concern about contamination – all asbestos types were assumed to have the same carcinogenic properties; they were likely to be contaminated with each other. And then there was the problem: the danger of science of putting the cart before the horse; the conclusion, the thing that was supposed to be proved, was worked into the experiment.. It had been observed from any number of people that asbestos was carcinogenic, and so the experiments just increased doses until there was cancer in rats.
“It was early days, people did not know what they were looking for,” says Bernstein. “You can’t blame them.”
These early findings, along with the infamous South Carolina epidemiological study, which – erroneously – showed that workers exposed only to white asbestos had elevated rates of cancer and mesothelioma – form the scientific bedrock for those in the European commission and the World health Organisation who refuse to re-open the dossier on Chrysotile ban.
Bernstein and colleagues carried out their own experiments. By drawing on his own colleagues, and of research published elsewhere in the 1990s, he found the following:
The mineralogical differences between chrysotile – its calcium component – and the amphiboles, as blue and brown asbestos are called, with their metallic component, iron, did not make a difference in its interaction once inside the lung. But bio-persistence and length of the fibre did.
The unique awfulness of asbestos is the fact that they are fibres, longer than they are thin, and that that they are extraordinarily bio persistent. The lung is equipped with filters that keep out spherical particles of a certain size; smaller particles that slips through are cleared away by so-called macrophages, a kind of white blood cell that digests foreign debris. Fibres can slip in through the filters because they are thin; but once inside, the longer fibres are too large to be removed by the macrophages; they eventually decay by other means, but in the meantime they irritate the lung cells. The smaller ones are nothing to worry about: they are treated as particles and removed by the macrophages. According to Berman (1995) fibres shorter than 10 micrometres do not contribute to rats’ cancer risk; and the measure most highly correlated with tumour incidence was the concentration of fibres greater than or equal to 20 micrometres in length. Potency appears to increase with increasing length, with s longer than 40 micrometres being about 500 times more potent than structures between 5 and 40 micrometres in length
What was the bio-persistence of chrysotile? Earlier this year, Bernstein and colleagues used Wistar male rats and exposed these to an air control group and to two chrysotile exposure groups at mean fibre aerosol concentrations of 76 fibres longer than 20 micrometres for 5 days/wk, 6 h/day, during 13 consecutive weeks followed by a non-exposure period lasting for 92 days. Animals were sacrificed after cessation of exposure and after 50 and 92 days of non-exposure recovery. At each sacrifice, subgroups of rats were assessed for the determination of the lung burden.
What they found was, first of all, no damage even at high concentrations of chrysotile – five thousand times higher than found in the work place, no lung scarring, no granuloma; and almost no long fibres; in fact there was a very short half life for chrysotile – equal to that in fact of vitreous synthetic fibres, glass fibres, which remain legal but regulated throughout the EU. In contrast an amphibole, tremolite, of the same family as brown and blue asbestos, showed lung damage. Why does chrysotile have such a short half-life? Because its fibre structure is that of a rolled up carpet, with its magnesium ions on the outside, due to the different bond lengths between the silicon hydroxide but and the longer oxygen bonds in the magnesium bit; this exposes the brucite magnesium to the lung liquid, which dissolves the so called brucite and which leaves the silicate bit vulnerable to the acid action of the rest of the lung. Amphiboles are made of sterner stuff, forming long horizontal rods, and a half life tens of times longer than that of chrysotile. “Chryostile quickly dissolves into what is basically talcum power,” says Bridle. Chrysotile’s half life for long fibres is one day for some varieties; for crocidolite is almost two years.
So why did early studies show that chrysotile caused lung cancer in rats? Because of overload of the system; in early experiments, including Davis 1978 and Coin 1992, when chrysotile was milled, for days at a time, using the hurricane grinder, not the best equipment for the purpose, because its metal scythes contaminated the samples, and changed them chemically, it produced an enormous number of microscopic particles that could not be detected by the phase contrast microscopes in use at the time; when rats breathed these in over a year at a concentration much higher than any man would endure, the particles – as diesel or even talcum powder particles would do – overloaded the rat’s lung system, clogging it up and reducing the ability of the macrophages either to deal with the small particles are break down the larger ones, which remained as carcinogenic fibres. The fact that chrysotile is unusually brittle, breaking under lung fluid into ever smaller pieces, also plays a part.
This did cause tumours; but it was not its asbestos fibre quality that did this – unlike ; it could be by particulate matter at enormous exposure. As a reference point, Bernstein used a synthetic fibre permitted by the EU called CMS – calcium magnesium silicate – with a large number of added particulate matter, which showed the same tumour creations as chrysotile ; another fibre, X607, similar to CMS but without particles added, showed no damage. In other words, scientific methods picked up on the wrong thing – the residues produced by a flaw in the equipment, and would have done so with any synthetic fibre;
Chrysotile is no more harmless than synthetic fibres – and these are permitted by the EU.
What about the epidemiological studies? There have been many, but they have suffered from methodological problems – more bad science. There was more dust in the air there is today; there was contamination of different kinds of asbestos at plants; workers’ histories and confounding factors such as their smoking habits were not scientifically gathered. .
A recent analysis by Hodgson et al, last year, fitted two models to the data of the male mesothelioma deaths in the UK between 1968 and 2001 , and predicted exposure patterns compared to the actual exposure patterns depending on importance of amosite and crocidolite. Chrysotile had no weight in either model. Another Survey showed that while South Africa is noted for amphibole mining it has also mined about 100,000 tons of chrysotile per year. Cases of mesothelioma have not been
found in the South African chrysotile miners and millers despite decades of production. The authors suggest one possible explanation for the scarcity or absence of the cancer may be the relative lack of fibrous tremolite, an amphibole that may occur with chrysotile ore elsewhere – and which distorts findings. A much bigger survey of surveys, published this year by a scientist called Charles Yarborough in the international Journal of Toxicology, shows similar resulrs.
Irrationality about asbestos defies any attempts to relegalise it. Legislation on synthetic fibres went to DG enterprise, that on chrysotile to DG Health, who have their own agenda; it is a political issue. The world health organisation, when conducting trials on synthetic substitutes for chrysotile, refused to open the dossier on chrysotile itself – apparently on direct, supervening orders from WHO’s director general.
There is a big industry involved here. Both Bridle – who runs asbestos watchdog, devoted to reducing unremoval and litigation costs to British firms – and Bernstein went to Bangkok recently on a mission: to get invited to an asbestos conference, organised by their nemesis, Laurie Kazan Allan, who runs an asbestos newsletter, rather triumphalist in tone, that notes each victory for the asbestos ban lobby.
“I could come, but I had to make some adjustments, but Bridle wasn’t welcome at all,” says Bernstein. Bridles added: “Kazan’s brother runs the largest firm of layers dealing with asbestos compensation.” There are tales of crooked experts on the payrolls of law firms, ready to tell lies in court, exploiting fears about chrysotile which, when locked into asbestos cement which forms much of the survey work of the “salesman for removals firm” that the “averagely ill trained survey firm now is.”
The Berlaymont was closed in 1991 to remove white asbestos costing millions and has been replaced with rock wool, which if anything is more harmful. Businesses with embedded and harmless white asbestos in the UK are paying huge fees to decontaminations firms to clear out tonnes of rubble which turns out only to be harmless white asbestos in two tiny insulation boards. There is a lot of ignorance, a lot of council inspection zealotry, a licence for cowboys, and a lot of money changing hands. Bridle, who worked in the cement industry, set up asbestos watchdog to advise on small firms facing ruin. While there are of course thousands who face cancer from the dangerous varieties of asbestos, up to a million households face the chrysotile survey problem. Dead people – who have breathed in naturally occurring asbestos all their lives – now cannot be buried because it would contravene, in theory, the EU’s laws on hazardous waste.
Bernstein has lobbied Ispra, the EU’s technical standards research unit, based in Italy.
“Why don’t you take another look at white asbestos. They never did.”
“The European Union won’t change the law on chrysotile,” says John Bridle. “Because the trade unions stand a lot to gain from the law suits, and they put pressure on the Labour party, who resist a change in Brussels.”
So the chrysotile issue joins the annals of bad European science, whose previous chapters include the Y2K problem, hostility to GM crops and aversion to nuclear power.
