Asbestos Removed is a Melbourne based Asbestos testing and removal service that is fully trained in Class A & B Asbestos Removal.
Asbestos is the generic term for a range of naturally occurring fibrous minerals. Commercially, the most important of them are the blue, white, and brown varieties, otherwise called chrysotile (serpentine asbestos), crocidolite, and amosite (both amphiboles). Asbestos is widely dispersed, but the biggest deposits are located in Canada and Russia.
Clothes can be made from asbestos--although it's literally a rock. But why make such products from a mineral except as a curiosity?
The solution lies mainly in the substance's unparalleled fireproofing and insulating capabilities. However, asbestos owns other attractive qualities: it's relatively lightweight (an important consideration when fireproofing naval vessels), abundant, cheap to mine and process, resistant to acids and water (and hence corrosion), durable to the point of indestructibility, electrically non-conductive, and unattractive to vermin. Ultimately, it may be put to a huge number of applications (usually when combined with resins, plastics, or other substances ).
In many respects, therefore, asbestos is the best material for an industrialising and electrifying world of warmth, combustion, and high-speed locomotion. Unsurprisingly, it was seen, for the first two-thirds of the 20th century, as the"crucial" as well as the"magical" mineral. From the mid-20th century asbestos was a component in all manner of things, such as motor cars (as an ingredient of brakes, clutch linings, and gaskets), buildings (for insulation and fireproofing), warships (also for insulation and fireproofing), domestic goods (such as ironing boards), and electric distribution systems. The product ranges of the biggest asbestos companies, such as Johns--Manville, the American giant which dominated the industry for several years, ran to dozens of pages. So asbestos had lots of"upsides".
Unfortunately, it also has a very significant"downside" because exposure to its own dust can cause three deadly diseases: asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma of the pleura and peritoneum. It's long been known that asbestos dust represents a threat to health; but several issues, including the relative risks of different types of asbestos and if there's a safe amount of exposure to some of them, stay in scientific dispute. Since the 1960s crocidolite was regarded as a specific hazard, chiefly due to its strong association with mesothelioma. Amosite is widely considered scarcely less dangerous.
In contrast, some have argued that pure chrysotile"may pose little if any carcinogenic hazard" if uncontaminated by amphiboles. As recently as 2000, pure chrysotile was termed"a remarkably safe and valuable natural resource", which might be employed to substantial public health benefit in the Third World. Others dismiss such views and need an global ban on all types of asbestos.5 Such scientific disputes and policy uncertainties conform to some longstanding pattern where medical knowledge about the health dangers of asbestos dust has emerged gradually and at times falteringly since the early 20th century. Since Irving J Selikoff, one of the foremost authorities on asbestos-related disorder in late 20th century America, once said, character long held"some secrets... rather close to its vest"
DISCOVERY OF A LINK BETWEEN ASBESTOS AND DISEASE
The sequence of creating knowledge about disease and asbestos has generated historic controversy. Some even assert that the health dangers of asbestos dust were valued in the early world; these claims have been refuted.14 Those dozens of occupational medicine, Thomas Arlidge and Thomas Oliver, ignored the dangers of asbestos from the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods (although Oliver addressed them afterwards ). The first medical paper on the topic appeared in the British Medical Journal at 1924.17 Written by William Cooke of Wigan Infirmary's department of pathology, after this case report, other newspapers soon appeared.
These included articles by Oliver, who coined the phrase"asbestosis", though most observers have wrongly attributed the expression into Cooke, who used it in a 1927 paper that further explored the Kershaw case. In 1928, after the discovery of a case of pulmonary fibrosis affecting a Glasgow asbestos worker, Britain's factory inspectorate took up the situation.
Edward Merewether, a medical inspector based in Glasgow, was instructed to determine"whether the incidence of the disease in an asbestos worker was only a coincidence or evidence of a certain health risk in the [asbestos] sector". At 36 years old, Merewether was relatively young when he embarked upon this job. he was appointed in 1927.
Merewether's first survey was shortly followed with a full-scale investigation, which he finished in Oct 1929. He found exposure to asbestos dust, especially for prolonged periods at high concentrations, constituted a"definite occupational risk among asbestos workers as a class". The fibrosis of the lungs which could result might lead to"complete disablement" and departure. His report endorsed a view expressed a month or two before that a"new" disease, pulmonary asbestosis, was discovered.
Merewether had confirmed the presence of a new deadly disease, but he also thought that this disease was preventable. Dust control, he expected,"will lead to, firstly, a terrific gain in the duration of time before employees develop disabling fibrosis, and second, the almost total disappearance of the disease, as the measures for the reduction of dust are perfected".At this stage, Merewether's colleague, the technology inspector of factories, Charles Price, researched and recommended practical measures to control dust.
Following discussions between representatives of the asbestos industry, the Trades Union Congress (mostly from the person of its distinguished medical advisor, Dr Thomas Legge, the first medical inspector of factories), individual unions, the factory inspectorate, and senior Home Office officials, the government enacted the Asbestos Industry Regulations, 1931.
Founded in total in 1933, these required the reduction of dust from the dustiest, and hence, apparently, the poisonous, regions of asbestos factories. With these steps in place, and for decades to come, it was broadly agreed that the 1931 regulations had solved the issue of asbestosis in British asbestos factories. Thus, in 1955, Richard Doll called the infrequency of asbestosis and credited its rarity to the"great decrease in the quantity of dust in asbestos functions" because the early 1930s. In the same year, Donald Hunter, then one of the leading authorities on occupational health, observed that the laws had been"successful in controlling the disease" of asbestosis. Other distinguished figures, including Georgiana Bonser of both Leeds University and Andrew Meiklejohn of Glasgow University, expressed similar views.
All these remarks called the British experience; for many years Britain's attempts to stop asbestos-related disease weren't replicated elsewhere. In the united states, asbestos was mined, manufactured, and used in massive amounts (table 1), however, outside of the patchy industrial hygiene measures established by several nations starting in the 1930s, little regulation pre-dated the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. By this time regulatory and scientific attitudes towards asbestos disease was transformed in a number of ways. Most significantly, it was ascertained that asbestosis wasn't the only disease associated with exposure to asbestos dust.
Suspicion that asbestosis may be connected with lung cancer started to emerge from the 1930s. This connection became more persuasive in the 1940s, although doubts remained. Then, in 1955, Doll established to the satisfaction of informed observers that a causal association existed between asbestosis and lung cancer.He thought, nevertheless, that the Asbestos Industry Regulations had greatly reduced the risk of lung cancer for people who worked in Britain's asbestos factories. As he wrote in 1960,"It appears likely that the threat may now be largely eliminated".
Right now, notwithstanding the discovery of another asbestos-related disease, there was every reason to assume that the asbestos industry could continue to generate the fireproofing, insulation, and friction materials widely considered crucial to modern life, given that employees were protected from the heavy and protracted exposures related to asbestosis and lung cancer.
In 1956, Meiklejohn dismissed the idea of a ban as"completely unworthy and absurd". Such views remained widespread during the 1970s and even the 1980s. Irving Selikoff, together with the editorial pages of the Lancet, BMJ, and JAMA and other commentators, emphasised precautions over-prescription of this mineral. The 1960s saw important developments, to begin with, a third asbestos-related disease, mesothelioma, was detected. Secondly, it was shown that the dangers of asbestos dust weren't restricted to heavily exposed workers in asbestos factories but extended to insulation workers, other users of products containing asbestos, and people who lived near asbestos factories.
There were even suggestions that urban dwellers, even in cities and towns distant from asbestos mines or factories, might confront a threat just because they dwelt among buildings and automobiles containing asbestos. Third, even in Britain, with its well established and relatively significant level of regulation, some evidence indicated that asbestos-related disease had ceased to decline and was potentially increasing. Fourth, in Britain and America at least, asbestos risks started to attract increased media attention.
Between 1964 and 1967, stories about the health dangers of asbestos appeared in such national newspapers as The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Herald, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Morning Star, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, as well as in regional and local papers. In January 1967, the BBC broadcast a movie on the topic in its early evening news programme 24 Hours.
Following that, asbestos health hazards often featured in television and newspaper reports. Fifth, in 1969, the first third party products liability lawsuit claiming personal injury from asbestos has been launched in the united states, thereby initiating the process that resulted in the demise of several large, well established, and successful businesses. Cases of pleural mesothelioma were apparently detected in the nineteenth century. Consumption peaked at 882 908 tons in 1973.
The huge majority of American consumption (some 96 percent in 1956) consisted of chrysotile (white asbestos). But during the 1950s, South African researchers J C Wagner, Christopher Sleggs, and Paul Marchand Started to identify cases of mesothelioma in the crocidolite mining district of Griqualand West. What was curiously is they found no such cases in the neighborhood of the Transvaal asbestos mines, though the asbestos there was exactly the same as in Griqualand West. This discrepancy initially suggested the mesotheliomas in the Griqualand West district might have had a source unrelated to asbestos exposure. Wagner, Sleggs, and Marchand first presented their findings at a conference in Johannesburg in 1959.
Papers they released between 1960 and 1962 established a"possible association between the development of mesotheliomas of the pleura and exposure to asbestos dust in people residing in the Cape asbestos areas". As this quote indicates, the investigators hadn't established a definite causal association between exposure to crocidolite dust (let alone other forms of asbestos dust) and cases of mesothelioma among people who had never seen the northwest Cape. There wasn't long to wait. Papers published in 1964 and 1965 led to the overall medical recognition of mesothelioma as an asbestos-related disease.
Scepticism stayed in certain quarters, however, as a leading article from the BMJ later put it, by"the end of 1965 it was clear that asbestos workers are at particular risk of developing... mesothelioma". Though other causal agents have been identified, for many years asbestos dust (at least certain kinds of it) was widely thought of as the primary or even the sole cause of mesothelioma. Lately, however, the longstanding assumption that asbestos exposure only causes mesothelioma has been called into question by the realisation that there are"many instances (.20percent ) of mesothelioma for which there is little if any known exposure to asbestos".
A causal association between mesothelioma and asbestos isn't in dispute, but it has been widely suggested that the disease might also be causally linked with poliomyelitis vaccine contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40), which was administered to millions of people in Europe and the USA between 1955 and 1963. Mayall et al have indicated a"synergistic interaction between asbestos and SV40 in human mesotheliomas". But much remains in doubt. Carbone et al have cautioned against early"conclusions about the potential role of SV40 in mesothelioma growth from the general population".
Likewise, Jasani et al have observed that the"causal link between SV40 and mesothelioma... still has to be analyzed further". More recently, Gazdar et al have pointed to"considerable evidence that SV40 has a causative role in the pathogenesis of mesothelioma", but warning that"the evidence remains insufficient to distinguish between association and causation". At the moment, so it remains unclear whether a causal association exists between SV40 and elevated levels of mesothelioma.
EXTENT OF THE RISKS POSED BY ASBESTOS
Recognition that asbestos-related disease wasn't confined to unprotected workers in the dustiest places dates from the 1960s and had much to do with the discovery of mesothelioma and the appreciation that comparatively brief and mild dust vulnerability could cause the disease years before its manifestation. A few isolated cases of asbestosis in insulation workers were reported in medical journals as early as the 1930s.
Additionally, as we now know, the US Navy and Maritime Commission appreciated the need to safeguard heavily exposed shipyard insulation workers in the early 1940s. This knowledge wasn't disseminated to a larger audience, however, and Asbestos Worker, the journal of the US insulation workers' union, correctly noted in 1966 that"probably more attention was focused on these specific health hazards in the past 3 or 4 decades, than in the previous 30 or 40 years".
The key figure in identifying the hazards of insulation work involving materials containing asbestos and vulnerability to intermittent and mild dust concentrations was Irving J Selikoff of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Starting in the early 1960s, with financial aid from sources as varied as the insulation employees' union and (from 1968) that the Johns--Manville Corporation, Selikoff and his colleagues made a flow of books indicating, among other things, that insulators who worked with asbestos material from the USA faced an"significant risk" of contracting asbestosis, lung cancer or mesothelioma, and even gastrointestinal cancer. In Britain the development of understanding of mesothelioma and the dangers of insulation work coincided with the initial doubts about the 1931 regulations.
Because of this, the factory inspectorate began revising these regulations in 1964. Five decades later, after extensive consultation with scientists, business, and trades unionists, the Asbestos Regulations, 1969 were created. These permitted the continued use of asbestos only if maximum allowable concentrations of dust weren't exceeded and when other precautions were observed. The regulations applied to all work sites rather than, as previously, to asbestos factories alone.
The maximum allowable concentration for crocidolite was set so low that its use was virtually eliminated. From the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s further constraints, both voluntary and statutory, were put on the importation and use of asbestos. At their peak, in 1973, UK asbestos imports stood at a 190 000 tonnes per annum; by 1997, the amount had dropped to 4820 tonnes of chrysotile, by then the only form permitted.
Then, in July 1999, with one slight exception, the European Commission announced a European Union ban on all staying chrysotile usage by 1 January 2005. Britain implemented the ban some five decades ahead of schedule in October 1999. Other European Union members also have conquered the deadline, and other nations have introduced their own bans. Elsewhere, such as many parts of Africa, Asia, and South America, asbestos usage remains widespread. From the early 1970s, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA) identified asbestos as one of its initial regulatory goals and introduced a selection of controls.
For Abestos Removal in Melbourne contact Asbestos Removed we Serve North Melbourne, East Melbourne and the Western Suburbs of Melbourne with professional testing and disposal on asbestos.
Asbestos is the generic term for a range of naturally occurring fibrous minerals. Commercially, the most important of them are the blue, white, and brown varieties, otherwise called chrysotile (serpentine asbestos), crocidolite, and amosite (both amphiboles). Asbestos is widely dispersed, but the biggest deposits are located in Canada and Russia.
Clothes can be made from asbestos--although it's literally a rock. But why make such products from a mineral except as a curiosity?
The solution lies mainly in the substance's unparalleled fireproofing and insulating capabilities. However, asbestos owns other attractive qualities: it's relatively lightweight (an important consideration when fireproofing naval vessels), abundant, cheap to mine and process, resistant to acids and water (and hence corrosion), durable to the point of indestructibility, electrically non-conductive, and unattractive to vermin. Ultimately, it may be put to a huge number of applications (usually when combined with resins, plastics, or other substances ).
In many respects, therefore, asbestos is the best material for an industrialising and electrifying world of warmth, combustion, and high-speed locomotion. Unsurprisingly, it was seen, for the first two-thirds of the 20th century, as the"crucial" as well as the"magical" mineral. From the mid-20th century asbestos was a component in all manner of things, such as motor cars (as an ingredient of brakes, clutch linings, and gaskets), buildings (for insulation and fireproofing), warships (also for insulation and fireproofing), domestic goods (such as ironing boards), and electric distribution systems. The product ranges of the biggest asbestos companies, such as Johns--Manville, the American giant which dominated the industry for several years, ran to dozens of pages. So asbestos had lots of"upsides".
Unfortunately, it also has a very significant"downside" because exposure to its own dust can cause three deadly diseases: asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma of the pleura and peritoneum. It's long been known that asbestos dust represents a threat to health; but several issues, including the relative risks of different types of asbestos and if there's a safe amount of exposure to some of them, stay in scientific dispute. Since the 1960s crocidolite was regarded as a specific hazard, chiefly due to its strong association with mesothelioma. Amosite is widely considered scarcely less dangerous.
In contrast, some have argued that pure chrysotile"may pose little if any carcinogenic hazard" if uncontaminated by amphiboles. As recently as 2000, pure chrysotile was termed"a remarkably safe and valuable natural resource", which might be employed to substantial public health benefit in the Third World. Others dismiss such views and need an global ban on all types of asbestos.5 Such scientific disputes and policy uncertainties conform to some longstanding pattern where medical knowledge about the health dangers of asbestos dust has emerged gradually and at times falteringly since the early 20th century. Since Irving J Selikoff, one of the foremost authorities on asbestos-related disorder in late 20th century America, once said, character long held"some secrets... rather close to its vest"
DISCOVERY OF A LINK BETWEEN ASBESTOS AND DISEASE
The sequence of creating knowledge about disease and asbestos has generated historic controversy. Some even assert that the health dangers of asbestos dust were valued in the early world; these claims have been refuted.14 Those dozens of occupational medicine, Thomas Arlidge and Thomas Oliver, ignored the dangers of asbestos from the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods (although Oliver addressed them afterwards ). The first medical paper on the topic appeared in the British Medical Journal at 1924.17 Written by William Cooke of Wigan Infirmary's department of pathology, after this case report, other newspapers soon appeared.
These included articles by Oliver, who coined the phrase"asbestosis", though most observers have wrongly attributed the expression into Cooke, who used it in a 1927 paper that further explored the Kershaw case. In 1928, after the discovery of a case of pulmonary fibrosis affecting a Glasgow asbestos worker, Britain's factory inspectorate took up the situation.
Edward Merewether, a medical inspector based in Glasgow, was instructed to determine"whether the incidence of the disease in an asbestos worker was only a coincidence or evidence of a certain health risk in the [asbestos] sector". At 36 years old, Merewether was relatively young when he embarked upon this job. he was appointed in 1927.
Merewether's first survey was shortly followed with a full-scale investigation, which he finished in Oct 1929. He found exposure to asbestos dust, especially for prolonged periods at high concentrations, constituted a"definite occupational risk among asbestos workers as a class". The fibrosis of the lungs which could result might lead to"complete disablement" and departure. His report endorsed a view expressed a month or two before that a"new" disease, pulmonary asbestosis, was discovered.
Merewether had confirmed the presence of a new deadly disease, but he also thought that this disease was preventable. Dust control, he expected,"will lead to, firstly, a terrific gain in the duration of time before employees develop disabling fibrosis, and second, the almost total disappearance of the disease, as the measures for the reduction of dust are perfected".At this stage, Merewether's colleague, the technology inspector of factories, Charles Price, researched and recommended practical measures to control dust.
Following discussions between representatives of the asbestos industry, the Trades Union Congress (mostly from the person of its distinguished medical advisor, Dr Thomas Legge, the first medical inspector of factories), individual unions, the factory inspectorate, and senior Home Office officials, the government enacted the Asbestos Industry Regulations, 1931.
Founded in total in 1933, these required the reduction of dust from the dustiest, and hence, apparently, the poisonous, regions of asbestos factories. With these steps in place, and for decades to come, it was broadly agreed that the 1931 regulations had solved the issue of asbestosis in British asbestos factories. Thus, in 1955, Richard Doll called the infrequency of asbestosis and credited its rarity to the"great decrease in the quantity of dust in asbestos functions" because the early 1930s. In the same year, Donald Hunter, then one of the leading authorities on occupational health, observed that the laws had been"successful in controlling the disease" of asbestosis. Other distinguished figures, including Georgiana Bonser of both Leeds University and Andrew Meiklejohn of Glasgow University, expressed similar views.
All these remarks called the British experience; for many years Britain's attempts to stop asbestos-related disease weren't replicated elsewhere. In the united states, asbestos was mined, manufactured, and used in massive amounts (table 1), however, outside of the patchy industrial hygiene measures established by several nations starting in the 1930s, little regulation pre-dated the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. By this time regulatory and scientific attitudes towards asbestos disease was transformed in a number of ways. Most significantly, it was ascertained that asbestosis wasn't the only disease associated with exposure to asbestos dust.
Suspicion that asbestosis may be connected with lung cancer started to emerge from the 1930s. This connection became more persuasive in the 1940s, although doubts remained. Then, in 1955, Doll established to the satisfaction of informed observers that a causal association existed between asbestosis and lung cancer.He thought, nevertheless, that the Asbestos Industry Regulations had greatly reduced the risk of lung cancer for people who worked in Britain's asbestos factories. As he wrote in 1960,"It appears likely that the threat may now be largely eliminated".
Right now, notwithstanding the discovery of another asbestos-related disease, there was every reason to assume that the asbestos industry could continue to generate the fireproofing, insulation, and friction materials widely considered crucial to modern life, given that employees were protected from the heavy and protracted exposures related to asbestosis and lung cancer.
In 1956, Meiklejohn dismissed the idea of a ban as"completely unworthy and absurd". Such views remained widespread during the 1970s and even the 1980s. Irving Selikoff, together with the editorial pages of the Lancet, BMJ, and JAMA and other commentators, emphasised precautions over-prescription of this mineral. The 1960s saw important developments, to begin with, a third asbestos-related disease, mesothelioma, was detected. Secondly, it was shown that the dangers of asbestos dust weren't restricted to heavily exposed workers in asbestos factories but extended to insulation workers, other users of products containing asbestos, and people who lived near asbestos factories.
There were even suggestions that urban dwellers, even in cities and towns distant from asbestos mines or factories, might confront a threat just because they dwelt among buildings and automobiles containing asbestos. Third, even in Britain, with its well established and relatively significant level of regulation, some evidence indicated that asbestos-related disease had ceased to decline and was potentially increasing. Fourth, in Britain and America at least, asbestos risks started to attract increased media attention.
Between 1964 and 1967, stories about the health dangers of asbestos appeared in such national newspapers as The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Herald, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Morning Star, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, as well as in regional and local papers. In January 1967, the BBC broadcast a movie on the topic in its early evening news programme 24 Hours.
Following that, asbestos health hazards often featured in television and newspaper reports. Fifth, in 1969, the first third party products liability lawsuit claiming personal injury from asbestos has been launched in the united states, thereby initiating the process that resulted in the demise of several large, well established, and successful businesses. Cases of pleural mesothelioma were apparently detected in the nineteenth century. Consumption peaked at 882 908 tons in 1973.
The huge majority of American consumption (some 96 percent in 1956) consisted of chrysotile (white asbestos). But during the 1950s, South African researchers J C Wagner, Christopher Sleggs, and Paul Marchand Started to identify cases of mesothelioma in the crocidolite mining district of Griqualand West. What was curiously is they found no such cases in the neighborhood of the Transvaal asbestos mines, though the asbestos there was exactly the same as in Griqualand West. This discrepancy initially suggested the mesotheliomas in the Griqualand West district might have had a source unrelated to asbestos exposure. Wagner, Sleggs, and Marchand first presented their findings at a conference in Johannesburg in 1959.
Papers they released between 1960 and 1962 established a"possible association between the development of mesotheliomas of the pleura and exposure to asbestos dust in people residing in the Cape asbestos areas". As this quote indicates, the investigators hadn't established a definite causal association between exposure to crocidolite dust (let alone other forms of asbestos dust) and cases of mesothelioma among people who had never seen the northwest Cape. There wasn't long to wait. Papers published in 1964 and 1965 led to the overall medical recognition of mesothelioma as an asbestos-related disease.
Scepticism stayed in certain quarters, however, as a leading article from the BMJ later put it, by"the end of 1965 it was clear that asbestos workers are at particular risk of developing... mesothelioma". Though other causal agents have been identified, for many years asbestos dust (at least certain kinds of it) was widely thought of as the primary or even the sole cause of mesothelioma. Lately, however, the longstanding assumption that asbestos exposure only causes mesothelioma has been called into question by the realisation that there are"many instances (.20percent ) of mesothelioma for which there is little if any known exposure to asbestos".
A causal association between mesothelioma and asbestos isn't in dispute, but it has been widely suggested that the disease might also be causally linked with poliomyelitis vaccine contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40), which was administered to millions of people in Europe and the USA between 1955 and 1963. Mayall et al have indicated a"synergistic interaction between asbestos and SV40 in human mesotheliomas". But much remains in doubt. Carbone et al have cautioned against early"conclusions about the potential role of SV40 in mesothelioma growth from the general population".
Likewise, Jasani et al have observed that the"causal link between SV40 and mesothelioma... still has to be analyzed further". More recently, Gazdar et al have pointed to"considerable evidence that SV40 has a causative role in the pathogenesis of mesothelioma", but warning that"the evidence remains insufficient to distinguish between association and causation". At the moment, so it remains unclear whether a causal association exists between SV40 and elevated levels of mesothelioma.
EXTENT OF THE RISKS POSED BY ASBESTOS
Recognition that asbestos-related disease wasn't confined to unprotected workers in the dustiest places dates from the 1960s and had much to do with the discovery of mesothelioma and the appreciation that comparatively brief and mild dust vulnerability could cause the disease years before its manifestation. A few isolated cases of asbestosis in insulation workers were reported in medical journals as early as the 1930s.
Additionally, as we now know, the US Navy and Maritime Commission appreciated the need to safeguard heavily exposed shipyard insulation workers in the early 1940s. This knowledge wasn't disseminated to a larger audience, however, and Asbestos Worker, the journal of the US insulation workers' union, correctly noted in 1966 that"probably more attention was focused on these specific health hazards in the past 3 or 4 decades, than in the previous 30 or 40 years".
The key figure in identifying the hazards of insulation work involving materials containing asbestos and vulnerability to intermittent and mild dust concentrations was Irving J Selikoff of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Starting in the early 1960s, with financial aid from sources as varied as the insulation employees' union and (from 1968) that the Johns--Manville Corporation, Selikoff and his colleagues made a flow of books indicating, among other things, that insulators who worked with asbestos material from the USA faced an"significant risk" of contracting asbestosis, lung cancer or mesothelioma, and even gastrointestinal cancer. In Britain the development of understanding of mesothelioma and the dangers of insulation work coincided with the initial doubts about the 1931 regulations.
Because of this, the factory inspectorate began revising these regulations in 1964. Five decades later, after extensive consultation with scientists, business, and trades unionists, the Asbestos Regulations, 1969 were created. These permitted the continued use of asbestos only if maximum allowable concentrations of dust weren't exceeded and when other precautions were observed. The regulations applied to all work sites rather than, as previously, to asbestos factories alone.
The maximum allowable concentration for crocidolite was set so low that its use was virtually eliminated. From the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s further constraints, both voluntary and statutory, were put on the importation and use of asbestos. At their peak, in 1973, UK asbestos imports stood at a 190 000 tonnes per annum; by 1997, the amount had dropped to 4820 tonnes of chrysotile, by then the only form permitted.
Then, in July 1999, with one slight exception, the European Commission announced a European Union ban on all staying chrysotile usage by 1 January 2005. Britain implemented the ban some five decades ahead of schedule in October 1999. Other European Union members also have conquered the deadline, and other nations have introduced their own bans. Elsewhere, such as many parts of Africa, Asia, and South America, asbestos usage remains widespread. From the early 1970s, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA) identified asbestos as one of its initial regulatory goals and introduced a selection of controls.
For Abestos Removal in Melbourne contact Asbestos Removed we Serve North Melbourne, East Melbourne and the Western Suburbs of Melbourne with professional testing and disposal on asbestos.