Consider banning or using white asbestos safely and controlled?

Paracelsus said that only the dose determines whether a thing is poison or not and the controversial story about white asbestos fibers in fibro cement roofing.

Health Risk Factors and Dosage

Nearly 500 years ago, the Swiss physicist and chemist Paracelsus presented the basic principle of toxicology:“Everything is poisonous and nothing is non-poisonous; only the dose determines whether a thing is poisonous or not.”It means that the toxicity of a substance depends on many different factors, including the dose a person is exposed to, the method of exposure, and the duration of exposure.

In April 2017, a 16-year-old student in South Carolina died in his classroom after consuming a large bottle of Mountain Dew, a latte, and an energy drink two hours earlier. Research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association in 2017 found that energy drinks pose a serious health risk because just one energy drink can cause significant changes in blood pressure and the electrical activity of the heart.

The Controversial Story of White Asbestos

Although it has been used in Vietnam to produce fiber cement roofing sheets for more than 60 years, white asbestos is being blamed as a carcinogen. The organizations lobbying for the ban claim that white asbestos is a substance classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as a Group I carcinogen. This group includes 120 different substances such as lead, mercury, and common agents such as solar radiation, tobacco, vehicle exhaust, smoked meat, dried fish, wood dust, etc.

White asbestos fibers are wetted before being used in roofing sheet production.

White asbestos is an important input material in the fibro-cement roofing sheet manufacturing industry, so banning the import and use of white asbestos will put a series of fibro-cement roofing sheet manufacturing factories at risk of being forced to close, and thousands of workers will lose their jobs.

With over 60 years of practical experience and many scientific studies in Vietnam proving that no cases of cancer have been found due to exposure to white asbestos, experts say that it is not necessary to ban it because this type of fiber can be used completely safely. Industrial fibers or silica dust all have the potential to affect human health, however, they depend on three factors: size, exposure dose and duration of stay in the body. In 2014, through research, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established a safe level of non-cancer causing white asbestos of 9 × 10-5 fibers/cc or 9 fibers/m³.

Fibro cement roofing sheet manufacturing enterprises: Need an official decision soon

(Baonghean.vn) - After many years of working in the fibro-cement roofing industry in Vietnam, many business owners and factory workers are always living in a state of anxiety because the industry's policies are not consistent. More than a dozen businesses that cannot survive have had to temporarily stop production lines or completely dissolve, and the number of unemployed workers is increasing.

Asbestos is the general name for mineral fiber groups, of which the brown and blue fiber groups have been banned from use in all forms worldwide because they have a straight, rough, needle-shaped structure, which when entering the lungs will cause mesothelioma. The white fiber group has a twisted, soft, spongy shape, formed from many small fibers and research has proven that they are eliminated from the lungs after 3 - 14 days. White asbestos fibers are the only type of fiber that is still being used in more than 130 countries and territories such as the US, Russia, China, India, countries in the ASEAN region...

In the past, asbestos was used indiscriminately in the industrial race under unsafe working conditions. In Japan, before 1975, a large amount of asbestos including brown and blue asbestos was used in the form of spray directly on ceilings, walls and structural iron frames in buildings, causing the country to suffer the consequences of thousands of cancer cases.

Australia is a prime example with the second highest number of deaths from mesothelioma in the world. Blue asbestos was mined in Australia from the 1930s to 1966 and brown asbestos was used until the mid-1980s.

The US asbestos industry developed in 1858, and all types of asbestos were banned in 1989. However, in 1991, the US Supreme Court overturned the ban on white asbestos because there was no clear evidence of the harmful effects of white asbestos and this fiber is still an indispensable material in many products, especially in the automotive, aerospace and defense industries.

Currently, throughout Russia, there are up to 38,000 people working in the industry of mining and producing materials from white asbestos. Russian white asbestos is used domestically and exported to 30 countries around the world. White asbestos fibers in Russia are exploited in 02 mines: the asbestos mine in the town of Asbest (Sverdlov province) and the asbestos mine in the town of Yasniy (Orenburg province). These are all white asbestos mines that are hundreds of years old and this industry has created a city with a remarkably developed economy. According to the affirmation of the chief doctor of Yasniy Town to the survey team of the Vietnamese Government in 2017, in the past 70 years, no workers or residents in this city have had cancer due to asbestos, although the distance from the Orenburg asbestos mine to the residential area is very close, only about 10 km.

Houses made from fiber cement panels in Orenburg - Russia.

Each country sets regulations to control fiber concentration and ensure labor safety. In the US, the maximum allowable concentration is 0.1 fiber/ml in a work shift, India allows 1.0 fiber/ml, in Russia it is 2.0 fiber/ml. Vietnam applies the same maximum allowable concentration as the US, which is 0.1 fiber/ml. Regulations of other ASEAN countries such as the Philippines are 2.0 fiber/ml; Indonesia is 1.0 fiber/ml; Thailand is 5.0 fiber/ml. It can be said that regulations on white asbestos concentration in the air at the workplace in Vietnam are equivalent to US standards and are more stringent than many countries in the region and in the world.

Conclusion

In fact, the productsfiber cement roofing sheetcontains a very small amount of white asbestos fibers, only 8 - 10%, the rest is cement accounting for 90%. According to Associate Professor, Dr. Luong Duc Long - Former Director of the Institute of Construction Materials, Ministry of Construction, white asbestos fibers have a hollow structure, so adhesives such as cement will fill these fibers, creating a very strong, tight bond, difficult to destroy and very difficult to spread into the environment.