We were lucky thank you because the asbestos in our house was discovered by a man who knew the right contact and it was analysed and removed quite quickly. We had two months whilst the surveyor ignored our solicitors letters. During this period our home was sectioned off into safe and no go areas.
The children were sent to friends and we rented a house whilst the asbestos was removed, this took two weeks including air filtering.
After two years the surveyor settled 2 days before the court case.
In my previous life as a builder in the UK my local authority insisted that all asbestos removed from buildings was wrapped on site and then collected by their specialist disposal team and at significant cost to me. The same local authority disposed of the asbestos in open landfill along with general household waste!!!
Asbestos gutters and down pipes were the most common products and we would break them up and share it out into a number of nieghbour wheelie bins, after all it was going to the landfill with household waste.
When I started work in the 70,s we would readily use asbestos products. We would cut up sheets of the stuff to use for roof soffits while the dust from the circular saw filled the workshop where we were cutting.
I often think back to this dust exposure of all those years ago and so far I have not suffered any consequences.
I hope it stays that way.
Yes, asbestos dust has proved to be dangerous but usually following prolonged periods of mass exposure.
We all loved artex ceilings in the 70,s and 80,s and that stuff was full of asbestos!!
A part of my roof has the hard sheets of asbestos mix insulation.
I had the inspection, and it proved to be 65%. The asbestos inspector advised the same for that insulation …as for the corrugated asbestos/cement roof of one room.
That was, it is sound and not breaking up.
Leave it alone.
That seemed like a very bad idea to me, because the stuff can’t last indefinitely, and it seemed much better to remove it while it was solid and would therefore fall to bits less, as it was removed.
But the cost was enormous. The alternative was to buy the liquid, brush on fixative that acts as a sealant and prevents powdery residue.
Then leave everything alone. I didn’t do that either.
Everything very costly.
So I still have asbestos insulation, but a tin roof, because the asbestos corrugated roof collapsed. The bits had to be plastic wrapped and delivered. to to the special dump.
Its about 15 years since I discovered it. Can only hope, now, that no bad effects will occur. So far, OK.
Sad about it, though.
Sadly, John, it can take just one fibre of asbestos to give you mesothelioma. It has an amazingly long incubation period and it can be up to 40 years before you know you’ve been affected. It’s incurable and a particularly nasty way to go, which is why regulations are so stringent. We all know people who have worked with the stuff and never been affected in the same way we all know smokers who smoked 20 per day for 40 years and never died from lung cancer, but they are the exception not the rule.
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Nope. Untrue. One of many myths about asbestos.
I have an internationally recognised qualification in health and safety, so I kinda do know what I’m talking about… 8 out of 10 people with mesothelioma have been exposed to asbestos. Now, everyone is different but yes, for some, just a whiff is enough.
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You can get it from washing clothes with asbestos in them. Take a look here. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5497111/
True for pleural mesothelioma but less so for peritoneal (50% have prior asbestos exposure). However the incidence of mesothelioma amongst those exposed to asbestos is only about 5% so the majority do not get cancer - compare that with cigarette smoking where 30-50% will develop lung cancer.
You are correct in that cures are vanishingly rare - most present with unresectable disease and even those who can have surgery face a dismal survival rate (10% at three years following pneumonectomy).
Mesothelioma can affcet the lungs (specifically the pleura) or the peritoneum though that is less common and right down at the end of the scale there is testicular and pericardial mesothelioma.
Survival depends on site and stage but typically the median survival1 is about 2 years.
1] I.e half survive more than this, half less.
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2 - 10% is usually the given figure for asbestos exposure, so ok, let’s split it down the middle at 5% 
To be honest, it’s such a horrible way to die, I don’t think the regulations are unduly stringent and if it stops people dying from a known risk, all well and good. Damn shame as asbestos is such a useful material but given the potential consequences, better avoided.
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Amen.
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What is untrue? Im not sure what you’re referring to.
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Me neither - the most questionable claim that Helen made is the single fibre = mesothelioma which is a bit of a stretch but, I suspect, not totally impossible.
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Helen, you use the term “incubation period” in your post when referring to the clinical/medical trajectory of the disease mesothelioma, as if a single asbestos had the capacity to behave like a micro-organism, replicating itself through incubation to cause disease.
A reasonable inference from your post is, especially for a lay reader, that asbestos is a kind of infection with an “amazingly long incubation period”, like (for example) syphilis or leprosy, both infectious/communicable diseases.
Latency is a more accurate way to describe illnesses which take a long time to manifest clinically from the notional onset or precipitating trigger.
In a medical or clinical context incubation refers to micro-organisms such bacteria, protozoa, viruses or other self-replicating life-forms, a category to which asbestos fibres do not belong. They can’t self-replicate under any circumstances, or over any time period, days, weeks, years or aeons.
In this respect I suggest you are misrepresenting the danger of asbestos. I am not denying that it can be a hazard to health.
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“We all know people who have worked with the stuff and never been affected in the same way we all know smokers who smoked 20 per day for 40 years and never died from lung cancer, but they are the exception not the rule.”
Thanks for the heads up on the 40 year incubation period, it’s really cheered me up for the weekend!
I am not sure that your suggestion above is true as surely those who DO contract asbestos related diseases are the exception ie what is the ratio of asbestos related diseases to that of those who have at some point come into contact with the stuff to a greater or lesser degree?
For those of a certain age we have all touched it , handled it, and played with it in school chemistry lessons when we all had a small square of the stuff to protect the lab bench from the heat of the bunsen burner. Oh, and what fun it was to place the mat in the heat of the flame to watch it explode! I recall that these mats were always dusty.
I fully understand that asbestos is your specialism and, rightly so, you must and need to pedal the dangers of such substances but remember that me and millions of others were ignorant to that fact while manufacturers were churning out the stuff to build the world.
We know the dangers now and act accordingly.
Now plastics are the danger it seems although I doubt that one micro spec of plastic can “incubate” in the body for 40 years before growing into a plastic bag that suffercates you.
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From what I can remember from a long time ago, there are a few different types of asbestos, some being much more dangerous than others. It all comes down to particle size, and being a fibre, the ratio of diameter to length, and for certain types of asbestos it was a 3 to 1 ratio, and less than 10 microns in length (too small to see). These are “respirable”, I.e. will be inhaled all the way down into the alveolar regions of the lungs where they can impact on the mucus membranes and get stuck.
The normal natural process would be for the body to remove a particle by macrophage ingestion, but this isn’t possible due to the nature of asbestos.
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Peter, I’m an H&S professional, not a doctor and I’m not going to quibble over terminology. There are plenty of medically based, peer reviewed studies out there on the dangers and effects of asbestos for you to read. It’s not me you are arguing with over how dangerous it is, it’s decades of research and evidence, plenty of which does suggest that even very low levels of exposure can be fatal. As I said above, we are all different and the same thing affects individuals in different ways. Incidentally, I didn’t get into H&S because I just love regulations, I did it because I care enough about my fellow humans to stop them killing or injuring themselves when it can be avoided and being killed or injured by employers who care more about profit than their lives. It’s one of the most misrepresented professions out there.
John, yes it does usually take a remarkably long time before you get mesothelioma if you are going to get it. Statistically, a 2-10% chance of getting it from asbestos exposure. We all did a lot of things in ignorance and I don’t necessarily believe through malice either. When asbestos and plastic were created it wasn’t in order to kill people or trash the planet, it was to make things better and easier for folk. Ok, didn’t turn out that way in the end so now we know better, we must do better.
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Hi folks - me, thinking about asbestos - what do I know about it ?? The only thing which has been stuck in my brain since heaven knows when (teenage years) - is that asbestos can get into the lungs and kill you donkey’s years later. (something about a hook - and the lungs being unable to expel)
There’s been loads about it: TV, Newspapers, Radio - whatever, probably Pathe News as well - for almost as long as I can remember, too.
Whether all that I have read and heard etc is absolutely true, I don’t need to know. I give asbestos a wide berth.
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Dear Survive France
Its worrying that I have touched on a very contentious subject. I’m sorry for ever bringing it up really…please don’t fall out about this, I’m appreciative on all the advice but can we draw a line under it now? I’m not buying anything with Asbestos. Better safe than sorry…dont answer that 
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You can always tick the “solved” thingy if you are finished with this enquiry.
Thank you. I didn’t know about this. Will do.