I keep hearing about it in different contexts but still am not too sure what it is why it was considered good and turned out to be bad. Anyone know?
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It was used to keep buildings insulated from the outside. It’s still good at that, but now it turns out to give you cancer.
Asbestos is a naturally occurring silicate mineral. People have been using it since antiquity because it is flame resistant. Even the Ancient Greeks knew about it. During the Industrial Revolution it was mined at large scale, and used in all sorts of products – insulation for homes, textiles, bricks…
The problem with asbestos is that when you cut it, you release tiny fibers into the air, and these tiny fibers are incredibly sharp. So you breathe in the tiny fibers, and they cause tiny holes in your lungs. Long-term this leads to scarring of the lungs, a condition referred to as asbestosis. You can also develop cancer in the lining of your lungs, which is referred to as mesothelioma.
It’s actually a [mineral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos) that is useful because it is fibrous and fireproof. Because of those two things it was used in a lot of buildings, often for insulation. I think they were also used in dropped ceiling tiles.
The problem is that the fibers are small enough that, if inhaled, they lodge in the lungs and can cause cancer. And if the asbestos was open to the inside room (like it would be with ceiling tiles) then there was always some small amount of asbestos being shed by the tiles, that might be ingested or inhaled.
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It is a mined mineral of various different types consisting of overlapping fibres. https://youtu.be/Ki0XO22YXUg
Asbestos is a fibrous mineral that [naturally looks like this](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jKsyZMs6BI0/Tc5B199RFPI/AAAAAAAACSg/F27777TmzQg/s1600/asbestos-3.JPG) but the fibers can be added to many materials. It was used in many buildings because it is heat resistant. It was also used in things like brake pads, insulation, etc. it was very cheap and did its job well. The problem is when you breath in asbestos fibers they stay in your lung and cause inflammation which can cause cancer.
The following is from *The Emperor of All Maladies*
by Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee and explains how asbestos caused the deaths of one of his patients:
>”One morning in 1968, a minute sliver of asbestos from his equipment wafts through the air and lodges in the vicinity of that cell. His body reacts to the sliver with an inflammation. The cells around the sliver begin to divide furiously, like a minuscule wound trying to heal, and a small clump of cells derived from the original cell arises at the site.”
Then those cells gradually acquire additional mutations (with the help of cigarette smoke and the inflammation from the asbestos fiber) needed to be cancerous over the next few decades.
>”The man is occasionally short of breath. He feels a tingle of pain in the periphery of his lung. Occasionally, he senses something moving under his rib cage when he walks. Another year passes, and the sensations accelerate.”
He then goes to his doctor and is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer.
> “Intravenous chemotherapy is initiated. The cells in the lung tumor respond. The man soldiers through a punishing regimen of multiple cell-killing drugs. But during the treatment, one cell in the tumor acquires yet another mutation that makes it resistant to the drug used to treat the cancer. Seven months after his initial diagnosis, the tumor relapses all over the body—in the lungs, the bones, the liver. On the morning of October, 17, 2004, deeply narcotized on opiates in a hospital bed in Boston and surrounded by his wife and his children, the man dies of metastatic lung cancer, a sliver of asbestos still lodged in the periphery of his lung. He is seventy-six years old.”
It is a rock, but it is fibrous in form. You can make it into cloth, because it is rock it is fire proof. Because microscopic stone strands break and you inhale them it is also carcinogenic
Also, because smoking damages the cilia in your lungs, if you smoke and inhale asbestos the damage is 50 times worse
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