🚀 go-pugleaf

"tilvios" <toxaristhrasoe@yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:1147463356.427191.294440@j33g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

>> > When asbestos fibres become airborne, they will lodge in your lungs.
>> > Your body has no way to expel them.  Very, very bad idea you have about
>> > small exposure being harmless.  I know from being a home owner, I sand,
>> > saw, and drill through stuff at will.  Particles of asbestos could
>> > become airborne by such activities.  Smokers have to be very wary as
>> > the two risk factors together are way worse than by themselves.
>>
>>
>>
>> And we get back to my point- no study has ever shown that such exposure 
>> is
>> harmful.
>>
>
> My guess is you are full of shit.  It's not my field of expertise, but
> I'm an IT guy in an industrial company.



Good for you.  I know how science is done and how to read between the lines.

When someone says that A is inbdirect proof of B, and B is bad, and they 
come up with all kinds of evidence for A, it occurs to me to wonder why they 
don't just prove B directly.





> I've been required to have
> annual asbestos training in the past, and the experts in the field say
> there are no safe exposure limits to this stuff when the fibres are air
> borne.  How can you refute this about a known carsinegen (sp?) that
> your body can't expel?


Refute what?  No one has ever done a study of low levels of exposure. 
Refute their mere assertion?  I do that by merely asserting my own position.

For a long time people also said there was no safe exposure limit for 
radiation, until a student made a mistake on an experiment and got entirely 
the wrong results.  What he did by accident was actually test that theory, 
which no one had ever done before.

He went on to be a real scientist and showed that low level of radiation not 
only aren't harmful, but are beneficial (he remembered what he had done as a 
student).  It's called radiation hormesis.

Scientists are not expert statisticians.  They'll do their study and get 
data points and plot a line, but their data points will be over (say) the 
range 10-20 and they'll *assume* that the relationship stays linear outside 
that range, especially down to zero.  There are reasons for this kind of 
data to show a line that passes through the origin, but that does *not* mean 
that the relationship is linear over the entire range, especially at the low 
end.  They think that small exposures would cause small effects that would 
be hard to see in the natural variation in the data, so they don't do the 
experiments at all.  Then some joker comes along and does do the experiment 
and gets not small negative effects, but significant positive effects. 
Ooops...

Mother Nature isn't incompetent, and the human body is desiged to deal with 
occasional exposure to bad things.  Just because chronic high level exposure 
is injurious doesn't mean that low level exposure causes any harm at all.

Case in point- Tylenol.  Tylenol is toxic.  If you take enough (about one 
bottle) it *will* kill your liver and you will die a very slow (a week or 
two), painful, inevitable death (it would take a liver transplant to save 
you, and attempted suicides don't get transplants).  But that doesn't mean 
that taking a little causes proportionately less damage to your liver. 
Staying within the recommended dose doesn't damage your liver at all.  (but 
if you have liver problems they will tell you to stay away from Tylenol) 
The means is saturation of the mechanism that flushes toxins.  So long as 
the amounts are within the range the body can handle there's no problem at 
all.  Outside that range the effects start building, and if you regressed a 
line it would pass through the origin.




>  It embeds in your tissues and is there until
> you die.  If you want this stuff in your home, please do all home
> repairs yourself so you don't expose any contractors to this stuff.


Yeah, right...

So tell me, are you going to stop taking Tylenol?





>> > I'm glad you aren't in charge of standards and codes for construction.
>>
>> Because otherwise inexpensive and highly effective solutions might be 
>> used
>> instead of expensive and less effective ones?
>
> Whatever.  The material was banned for a reason.


Yes, that reason was paranoia, not science.  DDT was banned because of 
paranoia too, an the tens of millions of dead since then have shown that 
paranoia kills, it is not the 'safe' path.