Asbestos Cancer Mesothelioma Risks and Dangers

Asbestos represents a miracle to the construction, shipbuilding and manufacturing industries.  Asbestos is readily available in nature and it is inherently resistant to fire and heat.  This characteristic resistance to heat and fire makes asbestos wonderful as primary material for insulation and fireproofing.  The abundance of asbestos in nature means that it is relatively cheap to extract and use.  It is a wonderful product of nature and people needed no further impetus to exploit it.

As early as 3000 BC, people have been taking advantage of asbestos’ insulating characteristics.  As the times changed and technology became more advanced, asbestos became a standard building material.  Painstaking years of research have yielded more and more uses for asbestos.  Asbestos is now a standard component in cement and plastic, hot water pipes, steam pipes and all other types of pipes, friction flooring and floor tiles, on ovens, furnaces and other appliances, in cars, on roof shingles and sidings.  Asbestos is in fact everywhere.

Inherent Asbestos  Dangers

Asbestos seemed too good a material to pass up.  Unfortunately, asbestos is far from the miracle it was purported to be.  It is in fact a scourge that carries grave inherent risks.

Asbestos is a fibrous mineral.  As such, it is easily inhaled when people are exposed to it.  Asbestos fibers go in and do not readily go out of the human body.  They accumulate and fester, distressing the lungs and other organs that it has invaded.

Since asbestos is more easily inhaled than ingested, the lungs become the usual repository of asbestos fiber deposits.  Within the lungs, these fibers cause irritation.  The lungs detect the presence of the fibrous matters and proceed to attack them.  Lung cell damage and scarring are the obvious results.  Once the air sacs and airways have acquired scar tissues, they become congested and so the lungs can no longer ingest as much oxygen as it normally can.  The unlucky owner of this pair of lungs begins to suffer difficulty breathing and persistent coughing.

In some cases, the fibers affect the lungs differently and cause cancer of the lung cells, cancer of the mesothelial cells that make up the inner lining of the lungs (mesothelioma), or both.  In any of these scenarios, the asbestos stimulates the cells to mutate.  This mutation causes the cells to replicate uncontrollably; normal cells have inherent reproduction limits to prevent one cell from attacking another.  The cancerous cells accumulate and become tumors.  These tumors can spread cancer to other tissues in the lungs.  A breakaway of a cancerous cell from this tumor can spread through the blood circulation and lymphatic system and can thus begin the formation of cancerous cells in other organs of the body.

Mesothelioma does not occur only in the lung membranes.  Apparently, the serous cavity membranes of the chest, the abdomen and the cavity around the heart are more vulnerable to asbestos-induced cancers.

Asbestos, though it is more easily inhaled, can still be inadvertently ingested.  Repeated and high-level ingestion of asbestos-contaminated food and water can lead to serious dangers as grave as those mentioned above.  There are allegations that asbestos causes cancer of the gastrointestinal tract, the larynx, the oropharynx, and the kidneys.

The Asbestos Controversy

 Apparently, asbestos testing has yielded the knowledge that asbestos presents a serious health hazard to the workers who are extensively and repetitively exposed to it.  Unfortunately, these tests were sponsored by the businesses which benefit the most from asbestos use.  These businesses chose to put productivity and profits over concern for their workers, employees and the people who lived in close proximity to the manufacturing and processing factories.

As a consequence of this hush job, asbestos use continued to prevail.  The prevalence of asbestos use in the construction, manufacturing and shipbuilding industries resulted in the exposure of a lot of workers in these industries.  The people living nearby the factories where asbestos was used in manufacturing end products also got exposed to gross amounts of the fibrous minerals.

The fact that the diseases associated with asbestos inhalation and ingestion take a lot of time to develop and are hard to diagnose did not help matters any.  This and the silence by those who knew the risks of asbestos signed the death warrants of many people.

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