Asbestos Widely Used in Asia's Building Boom and Exported:

[amborin]

Asia Inhales While the West Bans the Deadly Carcinogen

by Melody Kemp

"In parts of Asia, carrying 500 grams of one white powder can draw a death sentence, but importing 1,000 tons of another lethal white dust is both legal and profitable.

Asbestos, a known carcinogen banned in much of the world, is a common and dangerous building block in much of Asia’s development and construction boom. This other white powder causes 100,000 occupational deaths per year, according to Medical News Today.

While images of kids with heroin-loaded needles stuck in their arms spark public outrage, clouds of asbestos fibers in factories and on construction sites often draw official shrugs and denials. Illicit drug use does not rank among the top ten causes of death in young adults, according to a 2009 global study of adolescent health by the Murdoch Children’s Research Center in Melbourne in 2009. But in some Asian nations including China, asbestos is in the top ten causes of occupational disease in laborers, some of whom were exposed as working children. The numbers are generally thought to be higher since much of Asia's data rely on a highly mobile workforce with high a turnover rate.

Like a sleeping grizzly bear, asbestos can be deadly when disturbed, and all along the mining, manufacturing, installation, cutting, and deconstruction processes, the mineral is turned into air-borne fibers that lodge in the lungs and cause fatal respiratory diseases, including mesothelioma.

Across much of Asia, white asbestos, also known as chrysotile, is widely used to make asbestos-cement construction material such as roofing tiles, wall panels, and expansion joints, as a fire proofer, and in brake linings and gaskets in large vehicles. As part of the process of development, people are trading bug-filled, flammable grass roofs for asbestos cement tiles and walls.

A few years ago at a state-owned roof tile factory in Vietnam young male workers clad only in shorts carried bags labeled “Asbestos-Kazakhstan.” The air was thick with white dust huffing up like steam from lava. Visiting occupational health and safety experts held their breath as long as they could; some smothered their faces in dust masks. The workers did not have that luxury. Their only protection was handkerchiefs tied bandit-style over their mouths and noses as they climbed the sides of the hoppers.

“I know it’s dangerous,” said the manager spreading his hands and shrugging, “but it’s also cheap, and people only want to buy cheap tiles.”

Drugs or Dust

“It's just a PR campaign when they say that asbestos can kill,” Uralasbest's Viktor Ivanov told AFP in 2007, when he headed the Chrysotile Association, an industry group based in the Russian town of Asbest. The website for Uralasbest, the Ural Asbestos Mining & Ore Dressing Company, calls the company the world's “oldest and largest manufacturer and supplier of chrysotile.” In 2005 the Russian firm produced about a quarter of the world's chrysotile asbestos and exported it to 35 countries (pdf): 53 percent outside the Commonwealth of Independent States (to China, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, etc.), and 13 percent within the CIS nations that had been part of the former Soviet Union (Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, etc.).....

snip

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15529

[Chemisse]

1. Now I am waiting to hear how we have imported materials with asbestos

We should not even be doing business with a country with so little regard for the health of its consumers.

[panzerfaust]

2. The science of the risk of asbestos is far from settled

You will not find "main stream" scientific journals publishing papers showing that this wonderful, cheap, long-lasting building material is not only safe, but has positive benefits on health. The establishment will only allow poorly researched and documented "studies" which purport to show a health risk from this Entirely Natural Substance.

I ask you, if this Naturally Occurring, cheap as dirt, fire-proof, extraordinary effective insulator was truly a risk we would all be dead now as it is found in soils throughout the world.

As noted in the article, even a top administrator from an asbestos company is willing to say that "It's just a PR campaign when they say that asbestos can kill." Surely he is in a better position to know than a few elite "scientists" back in a lab somewhere where they are working on the Green's agenda.

Just more Junk Science.

[haikugal]

4. Sarcasm?

Surely you jest?!

[amborin]

5. isn't anthrax also naturally occurring?

[Po_d Mainiac]

6. if this Naturally Occurring, cheap as dirt........So is "quicksilver"

Ever hear the phrase "mad as a hatter?"

[kestrel91316]

7. ROFL. Excellent mimicry of RW nonsense!!!!

I expecially like the inappropriate capitalizations. But you need to misspell more.

[madrchsod]

3. welcome to the industrial revolution....

unregulated capitalism always follows cheap disposable labor.