Law mesothelioma michigan

When school custodians in Oakland County, Mich., want to fix a leaky water valve, they don head-to-toe spacesuits. "They make you sweat like a pig," says facilities consultant Bill Lee. Then, they test the air near the leaky valve. Next, they wet the insulation surrounding the pipe, chip it off, seal it in a bag, seal that in another bag, then check the air again. Only after that can they strip off their spacesuits and actually replace the offending valve.

The reason for all the elaborate precautions: asbestos. A tough, heat-resistant mineral fiber associated with lung disease, asbestos has long had the reputation of a workplace hit man. The reputation has cost plenty. Across the nation, school districts that can't buy new library books are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to deal with asbestos because they mistakenly believe their children are in great danger. In the fall of 1993, for instance, New York City closed its public schools for two weeks and spent $83 million on asbestos reinspection and removal because earlier asbestos inspections were shoddy. Total spending nationwide has been $10 billion, the National School Boards Association told Congress earlier this month. Experts say it could reach $30 billion.

Much of the money, though, is probably being spent in vain. There is no telling how much of the cleanup might have been necessary. No one has ever determined how much asbestos in the air is unsafe, and there is now broad consensus among scientists and physicians that asbestos in public buildings is not much of a threat to health. "A phantom risk" is what Richard Wilson, a physics professor at Harvard University, calls it. A study soon to be released by the federal Office of Technology Assessment will say much the same thing.

Paper-thin evidence. How America's money-strapped schools could have so overreacted to the perceived threat from asbestos is an illuminating tale. One part, at least, is understandable: Parents and teachers pressed for drastic remedies for something they were told was a real danger. Less understandable is the role of government agencies, especially the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which created a public panic on the basis of paper-thin scientific information.

It's also a story about how the instinct to act overwhelms common sense. "When everybody's shouting `Fire!' in a theater, the man who quietly stands in the corner and says, `There's no fire,' is rarely heeded," observes Arthur Langer, director of the Environmental Sciences Laboratory at Brooklyn College in New York, who has served on numerous asbestos-study panels. Langer recalls sitting with other experts in the mid-1980s to draft EPA asbestos rules. The documents used terms like "hazard" and "emergency." "I said, `Let's change the language of this; we are using emotive words,'" Langer said. "They just blew me out." John Welch, president of an association of former manufacturers of asbestos products, told an EPA panel in 1984 that since asbestos was present in the air everywhere, the EPA should set standards for levels deemed permissible. "They didn't want to hear it," he says. "`No safe level' was the foundation of their arguments."

First warning. The saga began in the 1950s when a brilliant, energetic physician named Irving Selikoff documented that workers in mines, shipbuilding and other asbestos-using industries had contracted lung cancer, asbestosis--a disease marked by stiffening of the lung tissues--and a rare lung cancer called mesothelioma. By the 1970s, Selikoff's research was the foundation for lawsuits against asbestos manufacturers. Many were driven out of business. (Others continue to pay. Last October 31, for instance, 10 large asbestos manufacturers settled with 15,000 school districts for $200 million in damages.)

Selikoff's findings scared school leaders because many walls, floor and ceiling tiles, roofs and insulation materials contained asbestos fibers. If the surfaces were abraded, asbestos could float into the air and be inhaled. Parents feared their kids could get asbestosis.

That fear was misguided: Early studies concluded that asbestosis came only after long-term inhalation of large volumes of asbestos dust, as in dirty factories. A more likely risk to children was lung cancer. But again, early studies had seen a high coincidence between smoking and asbestos-linked lung cancer. More important, the risk of all these diseases seemed to be tied to the exposure level. How much was too much?

To help local officials, EPA published a "guidance" book in 1979. It had a bright-orange cover and was known thereafter as the Orange Book. But instead of declaring what levels of airborne asbestos were safe or unsafe for children, it issued directions on how to search for asbestos-containing materials. The only "permanent" solution, it said, was to take it out. Four years later, the EPA issued its Blue Book, which said much the same thing: Removal was "always appropriate, never inappropriate."

Joseph Breen, an EPA official who worked on the Orange Book, recalls, "There was a cry to get something out, and the best available information was what had been done to date." Unfortunately, at the time, little work had been done on the health effects of low levels of asbestos in schoolroom air.

While the Orange and Blue books did not command that asbestos be torn out, their dire admonitions--plus the availability of federal funds for asbestos removal only--pushed schools into many needless removals. An asbestos-remediation industry sprang up overnight; it would gross $4 billion to $5 billion annually. Schools would pay up to $1 billion a year; other building owners paid the rest.

On second thought. But by 1985, some notable environmental health scientists were backing off. New data were showing that levels of airborne asbestos in buildings with even flaking insulation could be as low, or nearly as low, as the air outdoors. Asbestos was everywhere: It came from auto-brake pads and building and roofing materials. People breathe in a million fibers a year, and nearly everyone has asbestos in his lungs, scientists would say.

The new thinking was that most asbestos in schools should be left alone; in most cases, painting, spray-coating or covering it up was the best and cheapest solution. In a nod to the new thinking, the EPA's 1985 Purple Book placed "managing asbestos" ahead of "removal" on some lists of options. But the shift was subtle, and it was hardly noticed. Opposing interests now had a stake in asbestos removal: They included labor unions who wanted it out of workplaces, parent-teacher groups fearful for children and a mushrooming asbestos-removal industry.

Powerful convert. Perhaps most important, Selikoff himself had drifted from the position of being a neutral research scientist to that of an antiasbestos activist. He told a congressional panel in 1984 that the risk posed by asbestos in schools was intolerable. The subcommittee chairman, then Rep. Jim Florio of New Jersey, shepherded passage of a law called the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act in 1986. Florio says he wanted to end the confusing stream of "guidances," put an end to the sloppy and corrupt asbestos-removal firms and make the EPA write clear rules for schools to follow. The EPA did some of that: It put asbestos inspectors, planners and even haulers under strict regulations. It ordered schools to do inspections and create asbestos-management plans. All that, of course, added millions of dollars to schools' costs. The EPA, however, later argued that Florio had fueled the asbestos alarm. Florio counters that the EPA dragged its feet and never set safety standards.

By 1990, however, a mass of new data showed the true levels of asbestos in schoolroom air around the nation were extremely low. Articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and Science magazine argued that the asbestos threat had been exaggerated. These caught the attention of John "Joe" Schwarz, a physician and Michigan state senator, who feared the reasons to fear asbestos had been overstated from the beginning. It took three years for him to win passage of a law requiring school districts to keep asbestos-laden materials in place unless unique conditions made removal wiser. Opposition came from the state's trial lawyers, who represented plaintiffs in asbestos cases, parental groups, labor unions and even, surprisingly, schools themselves. "What was particularly pernicious, a bureaucracy had grown up," Schwarz now says. "The schools all had asbestos-maintenance officers, and they had all submitted their [EPA required] plans and were hellbent to rip it out."