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Q: I saw an article that the EPA recently changed their view on asbestos and also made it easier for companies to get asbestos-containing products approved. Is that true? How dangerous is asbestos? – AD, Hamden, CT

Thanks for the question, AD. Here’s the deal:

Asbestos is really, really dangerous. When you go to toxicology school (yes, that exists), one of the model chemicals they teach you about is asbestos. We know asbestos causes cancer, and we even know how it causes cancer. Read our talc post here for an earlier description of the mechanisms of asbestos toxicity. There is no scientific debate about the relationship between asbestos and cancer – asbestos is nasty stuff, and you don’t want to be breathing it in. Asbestos was briefly banned in the US in the late 80’s, but came back on the market in a very limited number of products in 1991 thanks to lawsuits by manufacturers. All new uses have remained banned. These companies argued (correctly) that as long as the asbestos in asbestos-containing products is not broken up into dust (technically, fibers) which can be inhaled, it’s use is safe. This is technically true for the people using asbestos products. However, in order to make these products people need to be around raw asbestos, and that can be dangerous if you don’t take your protective equipment very seriously. 55 countries have banned asbestos outright, and most developed countries no longer allow it to be mined.

In the United States, about 3,000 people per year die from mesothelioma – a rare form of cancer for which asbestos is the only known cause. The number of deaths from mesothelioma have been increasing over the last decade, which suggests that the EPA needs to do a better job of regulating asbestos-related products than they currently do. Asbestos can cause other forms of cancer as well.

So what changes did the EPA make? Basically, they reversed the ban on new uses. That sounds bad (and it could be), but a company would still need to go through a thorough EPA review in order to get a new asbestos-containing product on the market, so it’s not like new products could get to the market without a safety review.

That doesn’t sound too bad, but it gets a bit worse. The EPA has also proposed a new framework for assessing the risk of asbestos-containing products. This approach specifically limits the use of previously generated data with “legacy” asbestos products and limits the ability of EPA regulators to take into account build up of asbestos in the environment. Basically: none of the previous research on asbestos can be used to make safety decisions on new products. This is one of the stupidest things we at UYBFS have ever heard – you can’t just ignore decades of research showing that asbestos causes cancer. At best, this would mean much of this work would have to be done again. At worst it means potentially cancer-causing products could get to the market and stay there for years until new scientific data is generated showing they are unsafe. We already know that people will get cancer if they breath in asbestos fibers. We shouldn’t have prove this all over again.

This issue has been highly politicized. It is true that Russia (yeah, those guys again) is the country that stands to gain the most from increased asbestos use in the US – they are the largest remaining producer now that Brazil has stopped mining it (due to health concerns). It’s also true that a Russian asbestos manufacturer is labeling their product with pictures of our President on them. That’s weird. It’s also true that said President once said that the banning and remediation of asbestos was a mob-led conspiracy and that it’s actually perfectly safe. This is just plain wrong.  The head of the EPA also said that this new asbestos policy was an “unprecedented” move to protect the public form the dangers of asbestos, his logic being that they are adding the new policy of requiring asbestos manufacturers to gain specific EPA approval before marketing new products. This is a deceptive lie – in reality, there has been an outright ban on new products in place for decades, and the current EPA administration has actually made it possible for new products to reach market once again. (Keep in mind that no new asbestos-containing products have been approved in decades.) Regardless of the your politics, if you breath in even very small amounts of asbestos, your risk of cancer is very high. It is in no way a good thing if there is more of this stuff floating around in our country.

The EPA under the current administration has done everything they can to limit environmental regulations. This is no secret. People will die because of the decisions the EPA has made in the last year – mainly from the increase in emission standards increasing air pollution and the effects of climate change. It’s not clear yet if asbestos-containing products approved by the current EPA administration will add to this death toll. It is technically possible to make safe products containing asbestos – but the annual mesothelioma death toll in this country suggests that we aren’t very good at this yet. The real issue here is that this administration’s EPA has made it clear that the public safety is not their primary concern. We can only hope that no dangerous products are able to make it to the market before this silly policy is reversed.