Asbestos, the “magic mineral” that continues to kill

Three months ago, the Government should have established the Compensation Fund for Victims of Asbestos that was prescribed by its law of October 19: “The implementation and start of activities of the Fund (…) must be issued within the period of three months from its publication in the BOE”. Today, three months after breaking the law, asbestos workers continue to die helpless and with diminished income. They and her families, like the wife of a bricklayer from Altos Hornos de Vizcaya who contracted cancer for washing her husband’s contaminated work clothes, without her being recognized as a victim by the Administration.

According to the Spanish Society of Pneumology and Thoracic Surgery, asbestos will claim 130,000 lives in Spain by 2050, which will add to the 60,000 by 1991, according to the National Institute for Safety and Hygiene, or more than 200,000 for unions. For comparison, the Covid-19 pandemic took away 120,606 people.

And what do they say in the Ministry of Labor, that of the highly publicized by efficient minister Yolanda Díaz? That “they are saturated”.

As a US correspondent for Interviú and El Periódico de Catalunya, in 1979 he reported that the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, agencies for environmental protection and food and medicine, respectively, warned that asbestos – aka asbestos, fibrocement or uralite – it was poison: lung, pleural and peritoneal cancers and asbestosis, pulmonary fibrosis. The worst thing was its presence in more than 3,500 products in common use and in industrial processes. The less bad, the strict deadlines that the North American administration gave to remove asbestos from public buildings and that the country was free of the dangerous mineral in 1986.

The thing about the EPA and the FDA was not the result of a heavenly inspiration. Since 1906 the devastating effects of asbestos on the health of those who were in contact with the so-called “magic mineral” were known due to its cheapness and extraordinary industrial versatility.

Governments knew this very well. So much so that, in 1918, the pioneers – in this sense – American insurance companies stopped insuring asbestos workers. In 1934, after medical studies that added cancers of the serous membranes to those known, Great Britain included them among the compensable occupational diseases and legislated to minimize the risks. The US waited until 1946, when it discovered the secret report of the macro experiment commissioned in 1943 by the leading companies in the sector: of 300 laboratory mice exposed to asbestos, 80% contracted lung cancer in three years.

The hidden report on the catastrophic effects was published in 1954 in the British Journal of Industrial Medicine by the renowned epidemiologist Richard Doll, who also linked tobacco to lung cancer. His definitive conclusions left no doubts about the link between the manipulation of asbestos with the aforementioned diseases and others that were being discovered, such as laryngeal cancer.

In Spain, the first asbestosis was not diagnosed until 1953. Dr. Luis López-Areal did it and his investigations managed to classify those of asbestos workers as occupational diseases, in 1961, and as the environmental danger that the “magic mineral” posed to all the population.

The professor of History of Science at the University of Granada, Alfredo Menéndez-Navarro, highlighted in 2013 “the battle that the unions presented, inspired by the Italian labor movement” to “consider that not only the workers were affected but also their families and work environments”, as well as the work of the media such as, among others, Interviú -I underline this because the appointment is unusual-, which created awareness that the risk was also environmental: “The problem is no longer a matter of the factories but that goes out into the street”.

The well-to-do World Health Organization did not consider it carcinogenic until 1977. And it is that the pressures, the lobbies, the disinformation campaigns of the “amianteras” were tremendous: with the prohibition of the “magic mineral” a billion-dollar business was ruined , present in thousands of products: from plumbing to toys, from cosmetics to brake pads. In 2018, almost the day before yesterday, the Organization of Consumers and Users denounced the presence of asbestos in a children’s makeup kit from the North American multinational Claire’s, present throughout Europe, to the Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products. And there are still numerous countries around the planet where the “amianteras” continue to do their immoral business: whoever comes after, let them drive.

This country, a specialist, like so many others, in abandoning its most vulnerable citizens, did not prohibit the use and commercialization of asbestos until 2002, half a century after its havoc was demonstrated and twenty years since it was prohibited by “the civilized countries around us”. , as they say.

And not even so. The highly respectable Superior Court of Castilla y León denied in 2014 the compensation claims of a Uralita worker from 1972 to 1982, who suffered from lung cancer, with the laughable argument that “it was then scientifically unknown in our country (…) the high risk of contracting this disease existing in jobs such as the one performed by the actor”. Doesn’t one of the General Principles of Law say that ignorance of the law does not exempt from compliance? Well, in this case, the supine scientific ignorance of the honorable TSJCYL allowed him to reject the plaintiff’s rights.

This lack of knowledge has been a recurring argument of Uralita, a company owned by Juan March, “the pirate of the Mediterranean” and one of the financiers of Franco’s coup, which made a killing with asbestos during Franco’s developmentalism. But it is proven that he knew the effects since he absorbed one of the first “amianteras” in Spain, the company Roviralta y Cía, founded in 1907; He knew it so much that in 2015 it changed its name to the innocent Coemac (Construction Materials Business Corporation), which finally had to close when million-dollar compensation sentences multiplied to direct, indirect, and even neighboring victims of asbestos, living or deceased. As usually happens, the businessmen washed their hands, not for hygiene, they closed the beach bar and the Government had to establish that Compensation Fund that it does not constitute.

If you are older, visit the Asbestos Management page and freak out by dotting how many of the more than 3,500 products made with asbestos you have used. And if you are not, pray or whatever you are in the habit of doing in case of danger because your electrical appliances, floors, the insulation of your house and an endless etcetera are after 2002, that the manufacturers have respected the law or that the inspection ad hoc they have been detected (in this case, in addition to the prayers and their substitutes, it is advisable to burn a stick of incense and let it be whatever Díaz wants).

Around those dates that I am telling you about, North American television repeated a scientific video that showed how an innocent hair dryer expelled microparticles of asbestos that entered the breath of the clean user. When I returned to Spain, no one warned of such a dangerous component in all homes nor, as far as I can remember, have they done so in all these decades. I decided to dry my hair with the terry towel; my lungs have enough to put up with the smoke and addictive chemical crap of 20 cigarettes a day (hopefully) for several, too many, decades.

By the way, I live in the Madrid neighborhood of Orcasitas, OrcaCity for friends, one of the greenest in Madrid, but in its remodeling in the 80s –a beautiful story of citizen struggle– an indecent amount of extremely cheap asbestos was used, which Now they are starting to withdraw.

And by the way, encore, I see I don’t have any incense sticks in the pantry. I go out to buy them.

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