This week, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Solid Waste and Emergency – individuals who normally handle toxic “Superfund” sites – will hear testimony on the agency’s plans to change the way it estimates potential cancer risk to those who have been exposed to dangerous asbestos.

While asbestos has been deemed highly toxic for more than a century and was declared a public health hazard thirty years ago, the fight continues, notes an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, largely because asbestos-producing companies continue to pay scientists to take up their cause. This science-for-hire continues to put innocent asbestos victims at risk.

“Scientists paid by the automotive and chemical industry and miners of sand, tale, taconite and gravel contaminated with asbestos, argue that whichever type of asbestos they use ‘can’t be harmful’ because the size, shape or chemical composition of their asbestos fiber is benign,” the article points out.

Even OSHA and the EPA both maintain that there are no safe levels of asbestos exposure. Nonetheless, in the interest of money, industry spends “millions of dollars funding ‘research’ to show that their products could not have harmed or killed anyone,” says the article.

“The personal injury asbestos litigation in the US is projected to reach $140-200 billion or more in the coming years, in addition to sums already paid,” Barry Castleman, an international authority on medical and legal issues surrounding asbestos, said in comments submitted to the EPA panel.

“Defendant corporations have gone to extraordinary lengths to reshape the scientific literature to defend these cases,” and his testimony cites chapter and verse. Castleman has been an expert witness at many asbestos trials throughout the country.

But while the scientists are testifying as to the safeness of asbestos, also present at the hearing will be a number of people whose lives have been forever altered by asbestos. Linda Reinstein, director of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, is one of those people. She lost her husband to mesothelioma a few years ago.

“As a widow, I am appalled to see public health risk analysis translated to math formulas that negate the progress science has made towards ending this disaster. Consider the rage of Americans, if we opened discussions about various types of tobacco leaves and their cancer potency factors,” she recently wrote.

“You must prevent disease with regulations and legislation that protect public health not industry. One life lost to asbestos disease is tragic, hundred of thousands of lives lost is unconscionable.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 5:21 am and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.