Word: fibers
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...next twenty years from a cancer-like malignant tumor that they will contract from constant exposure to asbestos, exposure that as urban dwellers they cannot now avoid. This fatal growth, called mesothelioma, can develop twenty to forty years after its victims begin to inhale the asbestos fiber. The tumor attacks the pleura and peritonium--the membrane sacks that surround the lung and abdominal cavities--and can grow whether or not the exposure continues. Most alarming of all, the number of asbestos fibers in the air around us increases every year...
...precisely because of this accelerating use that the fiber's threat to health has become apparent. Twenty years ago, mesothelioma was a disease so extremely rare that it was thought to be a freakish although invariably malignant chance happening. Until recently, most medical books did not include it in their descriptions of tumors, and the World Health Organization's Classification of Diseases omitted it altogether. It is now found in only one of every 10,000 autopsies performed in the United States. But because of the increasing presence of the mineral fiber in the air we breathe, the incidence...
...sooner had the history of the South African epidemic been reported in the medical literature than new outbreaks of mesothelioma began to crop up all over the world, wherever asbestos was mined or used in manufacture. It became evident that the onset of exposure to the mineral fiber among those who had died in Johannesburg had coincided with the beginning of asbestos mining operations, the first in the world, in South Africa. As the industry had grown, spreading into different geographical areas, successive generations were becoming increasingly affected. It was clear that the problem was proliferating like a juggernaut. Since...
Exposure is not by any means limited to those who frequent asbestos factories. The combined effects of day-to-day wear and tear on asbestos-containing products, as well as a certain degree of industrial planned obsolescence, insure that varying amounts of the fiber will be continuously liberated into the consumer's air. Floor tiles scuff, ironing boards rip and fray, clutch and brake linings are slowly ground down, asbestos cement dust is kicked into the air when buildings are destroyed by demolition companies. Up to a microgram of asbestos is now found in singlevial doses of injectable drugs. This...
...Frank Tull. His teeth had been fashioned for him and fitted to his jaws by a doctor of dental surgery ...He had a silver plate in his skull to guard a hole from which a brain tumor had been removed. One of his legs was made of metal and fiber; it took the place of the flesh-and-blood leg his mother had given him in her womb ...In his left arm, a platinum wire took the place of the humerus . . . One hundred years after he died they opened up his coffin. All they found were strings and wires...