What actually is Asbestos?

Question

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?

In: 10

Answer 1

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.”