Asbestosis
38 comments
·October 26, 2025pac0
noduerme
You gotta do what you can do - take the best of what you remember from your parents and grandparents, and pass it on. I don't feel like they're really dead as long as I'm alive. I hear their voices and their jokes and I see their smiles. Sometimes when I laugh I hear how my grandpa laughed, and I think, shit, I must sound old now. Kids make you realize how temporary we all are.
irjustin
Overall we're having kids later and later myself included. This is one of the natural consequences I will face. Sometimes I wish it had kids in my twenties but for now I'm glad I didn't. We'll see.
p0w3n3d
The best age for having kids biologically, in terms of health is... Close to 18. I had my first child when I was 27 and I was already very tired in the nights, we agreed with wife that it would have been better to start earlier. Some people have kids when 35-40 and I cannot imagine it at all. I'm too tired right now. Much wiser, but my health would not allow me to stay up nights
aidos
It comes up a lot on the diyuk subreddit so they have pinned mega thread about it. I like it to give a little balance to the conversation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DIYUK/comments/133jq4r/the_is_this_...
Etheryte
I don't really think asbestos is something that needs balance to the conversation. It's like radioactive material, you will most likely not even know that you've had too much exposure until your health is already permanently affected. The illness may manifest a considerable time later so you might not even know what it was. It's very easy to unknowingly be exposed when e.g. renovating a house or other similar arrangements because there is no easy visual way to identify materials containing asbestos.
bschwindHN
I recently came across this unfortunate promotion for asbestos from back in the day:
beejiu
It's unfortunate this article is about the UK and Imgur has blocked the UK because of the Online Safety Act :(
sva_
I wouldn't blame Imgur for that, but the UK gov + people who elected them/didn't resist.
monooso
Pray tell, precisely how should we have resisted?
rwmj
All parties supported the OSA (and it's surprisingly popular too) because "something must be done [about the internet], this is something, so this must be done".
beejiu
Oh yes, please don't think I was blaming Imgur!
bjobjobjo
And I just found this related passage in the Wikipedia article:
> More than 1,000 tons of asbestos are thought to have been released into the air following the buildings' destruction.
jabl
Asbestos was also used as 'fake snow'. Famously the snow scene in the 'Wizard of Oz' movie was 100% pure asbestos.
KaiserPro
I know its not fashionable, but things like asbestos is the point of regulation.
If you ignore the health effects, asbestos is a fucking brilliant material, strong(if used with a binder) exceptionally fireproof, UV stable and fairly inert.
Why _wouldn't_ you use it? To use modern parlance; only melts wouldn't use it, thats who (this message brought to you by your friendly corporate sponsor...)
The problem is that it still kills now[1]. Because its a time bomb, with a dwell time of well over 10-20 years, its very lard to pin point the cause.
The only way that its _stopped_ being put into building materials is through regulation. The problem now for us, especailly in the UK is the power of regulation is being ablated through incompetence, funding cuts and a concerted effort by those who stand to benefit from a weakened regulatory system.
Most regulation is formed from the blood of victims. We may not _like_ what the regulation is, and lord knows it needs improving. But to not have it, or worst, have it and not be enforced, is a terrible state of affairs.
[1]https://neu.org.uk/latest/library/what-real-risk-asbestos-sc...
jabl
Luckily thanks to regulation the use of asbestos in new builds has almost completely been eliminated (I'm sure there are some uses somewhere where it's indispensable?), but there's of course a huge number of places where it turns up in all kinds of renovation projects.
In addition to buildings, e.g. ships. Think about a steamship, what material that is fireproof and doesn't rot do you think they used for insulating boilers and steam pipes? One museum ship I'm somewhat familiar with ripped out all the asbestos insulation and replaced it with IIRC mostly mineral or glass wool during a major renovation some years back, just to make it safer for the mostly volunteers who dedicate their time to keep the ship functioning.
DrewADesign
Our business leaders have successfully painted shortsightedness, greed, and nihilism as beneficial business traits embraced by adults willing to accept life’s difficult realities.
In reality, only personal and group morality protected our society from such forces, and letting ethics retard profit and growth became seriously uncool in the 80s hippie backlash.
enricotr
Even if OT, I would take the chance to remember the great sicilian hacker Asbesto, that I never had the honour to know personally, for what represented for the hacker culture in Italy. And for his aweson woodcraft mastery. May R.I.P.
zeristor
I posted diamondgeezer’s blog post on High Street to HackerNews some time ago, and he was most bemused by the HackerNews effect on his website.
I’ve also just posted his great article on British Summer Time, I would have that would have been more popular;
wewewedxfgdf
Plenty of people die from asbestos exposure when renovating their house.
rwmj
Our house has an asbestos flue in the bathroom. I'm very careful never to go near that thing, and never ever to cut/drill/attempt to remove it myself. But I wonder how many people would never know it was asbestos.
sgt
If you leave asbestos alone it's safe, and if you need to drill into it, use shaving cream so that the fibers don't get into the air. It's not a big deal if you are careful. But don't be reckless - you need to know what you are drilling into and do it slowly.
hanspeter
This is an interesting claim.
How many is plenty and what are the sources to back this?
krbaccord94f
Designing the way to route amplifiers in aesbesto attic, which is one element for compressed exposure to respitory disease.
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SideburnsOfDoom
> The company mined asbestos-bearing rock at several sites in South Africa
"In South Africa" is not very specific.
it seems to have been firstly in this remote in the remote Northern Cape where "The mine eventually became the largest crocidolite mine in the world" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koegas_mine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos_Mountains
It predictably wasn't consequence-free at that end either, see the later parts of article. And many other sources, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2001/sep/15/weekend...
XorNot
Asbestos is genuinely more terrifying then nuclear radiation.
If something is radioactive then a Geiger counter will tell you at a distance, it'll even triangulate it.
Asbestos? It can be everywhere and the only way to know is to collect samples, pay $100 a piece to a lab to do phase contrast microscopy and wait.
Then do it again the next time you find something suspicious.
And once you've cleaned it out..well hope your handling was good coz who knows if you got it all - without collecting a lot of samples and testing again.
My house has a few asbestos pieces, and in digging up the yard I've pulled a huge amount of asbestos fiber cement from cheap renovations by previous owners - the stuff was about 10 cm below the surface.
CheeseFromLidl
Its carcinogenic “modus operandi” is also completely different to anything else. Asbestos is chemically inert, so how does is cause cancer? The tiny crystalline needles puncture cells, sometimes during cell division, and strands of dna will get tangled up and result in messed up genetics.
Aldipower
Yes and I would like to add, it is all about the "dose". It is a common misconception that tangled DNA will automatically lead to spreading cancer. Per day a normal person develops tangled up dna cells in the hundreds, that is a normal process, but the immune system can handle it without problems and can get rid of it (unfortunately not always). So with Asbestos it is all about the dose too. Although a relative small amount could be already _potential_ harmful.
jabl
I'm not a doctor or researcher in that field, but my understanding is that cancer is not 'one disease', but rather a huge number of different diseases which mostly have in common that they develop some kind of tumors.
That's also one reason why progress in cancer research and drug development is so slow. 'Fix' one cancer, and what you've developed likely has little effect on the zillion other cancer variants.
bregma
Mesothelioma caused by asbestos is only a single disease. It has a known cause. It has been well researched. The causal links are clear: prevention is the answer. It doesn't matter that other cancers are different diseases, that is irrelevant to mesothelioma caused by asbestos.
anovikov
It's not at all uncommon. Virtually everything that has tiny sharp pieces in it, will work like that. Graphene for instance.
emmelaich
If it's intact and below surface the risk is far lower. You have to worry about airborne asbestos.
Not saying you should ignore it but don't dig it up without knowing what you're in for.
KronisLV
When I was younger, my dad had me help him repair the roof of the shed by getting on top of it, putting these sorts of flexible sheets over the old corrugated ones (that are made of asbestos cement) and driving nails through the top one all the way until it'd hit the wood frame underneath.
Now, asbestosis is more common in long term exposure so it might be fine, but the idiocy of not bothering to tell me to wear a respirator and ignorance after I brought it up years later makes me disgusted. So now I have to wonder whether decades later I'll have complications without clear ways to address them.
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bartvk
By now, the dangers of asbestos are well known. What was his reasoning about being ignorant?
> My Dad lost his Dad at the age of 34, which is no age at all in the grand scheme of things. By contrast I still have my Dad at the age of 60, which has meant an extra quarter century of guidance, support, advice, love and always being there. How lucky am I?
I lost my father when I was 30. I thought I’d been lucky because I’d had him through my “adult” life. Now I’m 40 and have a 2-year-old son, and over these past ten years I think it’s when I would have most liked to have him — when more questions came up about what he was really like as a person, beyond his role as a father. He died at 72 from lung cancer; he had been smoking since he was 13 and never went to the doctor. I guess I was lucky after all…