How can you go 30-40 years without any illness and then suddenly you have cancer? What is the asbestos doing in that time? How does it activate?
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It’s not sudden. It is the slow, slow, *slow* result of continuous irritation and scarring in the lungs. My paternal grandmother died of mesothelioma, for example.
Essentially, the problem is that the asbestos fibers *never break down.* They’re little hairy filaments, so they seem so soft, but they’re *rocks.* Little tiny rock hairs. Those little tiny rock hairs get into your lungs, and they STAY there. Forever. But your body keeps trying to fight them, because they cause irritation. They’re a foreign body that needs to be driven out. So it sends wave after wave after wave after wave of macrophages and other immune cells, tries to coat the fibers in scar tissues, tries to use inflammation to wall off the area until the problem goes away, etc., etc., etc.
A strong immune response for a few days, even a few weeks, causes no harm to your body. That’s just the cost of doing business. But a *never-ending continuous* response for *decades* slowly causes damage to the cells of the mesothelium (the lining surrounding the lungs) or the lungs in general, causing mesothelioma or general lung cancer.
There is nothing “sudden” about the cancer caused by asbestos. It’s a slow, creeping disease, yes, but the cancer is the product of 15+ years of continuous damage to your lungs that your body makes *worse* by trying to fix it.
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