SCIENCE IGNORED

In 1991, the American Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs reviewed all the studies on the risks of asbestos and expressed frustration that the science was being ignored.
"Educational efforts by scientific organizations and government agencies have been met with frustration, and some of their attempts have been abandoned. In the meantime, real hazards to health - smoking, improper diet, inadequate exercise, high risk recreational activities-are disregarded by many persons while they complain about the evils industries whose actual hazards to health often are small by comparison."

The AMA said asbestos removal represented a "mismatch between scientific fact and the need for action."

Also in 1991, the Health Effects Institute, in an EPA-financed report ordered by Congress, conducted the most comprehensive study on the risk of asbestos in buildings. The two-volume study found the lifetime risk of cancer for someone who worked in a building containing asbestos was one in 250,000. By comparison, outdoor air in urban areas has enough asbestos fibers to create a one-in-25,000 lifetime risk of cancer. So an office worker is 10 times safer inside a building made with asbestos than outside.

Last year, a study for the European Commission reviewed the risks and reached a similar conclusion.

"There does not appear to be sufficient risk to the health of general building occupants to justify arbitrarily removing intact asbestos-containing materials which are in a good state of repair," the report said.

But the cold facts of science have been unable to overcome the passion of public fear.

"It’s like telling parents that there’s a bomb in the basement of your child’s school, but there’s only a one-in-a-million chance it will go off," says Malcolm Ross, a retired geologist at the U.S Geological service. "They will demand that the bomb be removed, no matter what the cost or likelihood of detonation."

Ross says the environment is full of such bombs--environmental risks - and it makes little sense to target a substance of relatively low risk with an unlimited budget.

"I get furious when I read about some school spending a fortune to remove asbestos," says Flood, the Arizona Health Department epidemiologist. In a worst-case scenario, asbestos might increase the 19,000 cancer deaths in his state each year by three.

"By comparison, we have tens of thousands of cases of skin cancer every year and hundreds of deaths, yet we hardly spend a dime telling people to be careful about exposing themselves to the sun," he says.

Thune, the epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, says there shouldn’t be rush to blame well -meaning federal regulators.

"It’s not an issue of a blundering bureaucracy that doesn’t know how to do anything," he says. "It’s hard in a complex system to shuffle resources from one compartment to another to get the greatest yield to public health"