The human race's use of asbestos has been riddled with controversies, much of which can be attributed to the numerous accounts of its high degree of potency as a health hazard.
Long before the start of the 20th century had even dawned, countless stories coming out of Greece and Rome have chronicled the mysterious "breathing" illness that had afflicted slaves who were assigned the task of weaving asbestos cloth. In the late 1890s, the suspicious death of around 50 asbestos workers in France prompted what would be known as the first ever study that delved into the possible health risk of asbestos. The result of the study however showed that the workers died from a generalized pneumoconiosis known as chalicosis. The fact that these workers were heavily exposed to a combination of asbestos and cotton dust could not be denied however.
In the first decade of the 1900s, the stories about the health risks of asbestos were anecdotal at best. At this time, asbestos was already considered as a dust hazard. But the gravity of the seriousness of it being a health hazard has not been recognized yet by the industrial sector. The 1920s saw the first wave of recognition about the health hazards of continued asbestos use. A British pathologist by the name of Dr. Cooke reported several cases of chronic bronchitis and fibrosis that he found in post-mortem examinations of lungs of asbestos workers. He gave this disease the name, asbestosis.
Dr. Cooke's findings were then followed by a large nationwide investigation into the health of some 360 of Britain's industrious asbestos textile workers. It was revealed that about a fourth of these workers suffered from pulmonary fibrosis. The results of this investigation resulted in the improvement of regulations regarding the manufacture of asbestos containing products as well as resulted in the implementation of hygiene standards in the factories, and the institution of requisite medical exams in the workplace. The asbestos industry also came to be included into the British Worker's Compensation Act. This unprecedented nationwide investigation came to be known as the Merewether report.
In the USA, the use of asbestos has also been very much marred with much controversies involving hundreds of millions of dollars exchanged between companies and workers. In the early 1930s, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company revealed that about 29% of the workers at Johns-Manville plant were suffering from asbestosis. The lawsuits that followed were settled out of court. A few years later, a group of asbestos companies agreed to sponsor research studies that will look into the hazardous effects of asbestos exposure to human health. These same companies however insisted that they have complete control over the disclosure of the results of the study.
It wasn't until the 1980s that modern regulation regarding the use of asbestos saw the light of day. An Asbestos Ban and Phase out Rule was issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1989. Two years later however this ruling was overturned in the case of Corrosion Proof Fittings vs. the EPA. To this day, trace amounts of asbestos can still be legally found in a number of products in the market. The EPA has put out a concentration limit of 7M fibers/L of drinking water for fibers with lengths of >=5 um. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sets a lower and more stringent limit at 100,000 fibers /m3 of workplace effective for 8 hour shifts within a 40 hour/week schedule. Other countries such as New Zealand and Australia followed suit issuing bans on the importation of asbestos in 1984 and 1991 respectively.
Controversy will forever surround the use of asbestos. It is up to individual countries to make sure that effective regulatory laws are in place to help keep in check the extent of its use and to ensure the safety of workers.
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