There are several consequences of asbestos exposure. Chronic interstitial lung disease generally requires prolonged exposure. Lung cancer (which typically occurs 15 or more years later) is dose related and has a strong (more than additiive) association with smoking. Mesothelioma can occur with short ( 1 - 2 year) exposures after an interval of 20 + years not peaking until 30 to 35 years after exposure.
Housewives whose only contact with asbestos was laundering their spouses absestos contaminated work clothing have been afflicted. So "casual" indirect contact of this nature can cause disease.
Well I searched on blindness guano and didn't find anything.
Are you telling me you know that it doesn't cause blindness? Or you know something about this?
Maybe I got mixed up and it causes deafness.
Maybe Pinochet somehow got all the webpages with this story removed? Although an easier technique would be to put something in the websearch engines to exclude certain results. That's why I used google and yahoo this time, and neither had anything (in the first 50 hits each.)
I'd send a copy of this to my brother, but he doesn't have email.
Ok now that's scaring me...... I would hope though that my family's exposure would still be much much smaller than the housewives who were doing this (laundry) probably day in day out so they might as well have worked in the factories themselves.
Has any> There are several consequences of asbestos exposure. Chronic interstitial
You have already been given lots of good advice. Asbestos has been identified as a carcinogen when it is in a friable condition. The floor tiles and the cut back adhesive that held them are not basically friable (dust, powder, pulverized - flying in the air). They can become friable by grinding, sanding, etc. The duct asbestos was probably the paper thin type and it would again depend on what you did to it during the remodel.
The basic precaution for any asbestos work is to keep it wet. By keeping it wet it does not become friable. I don't know what method(s) you did use during your remodel work, but I would not worry about anything unless you created a major friable circumstance. Even then, we must assume the dust has settled after 2 years. Wipe up any dust with a damp rag and a squirt bottle of water. There are testing agencies that will monitor the air in your space if you want to hire them. It is a small vacuum/fan with a filter disk and you would place several around various places in the house including the attic and basement. The filters are taken to a lab for analysis. If this would provide peace of mind, I think you should go ahead and contact a testing agency.
During professional asbestos removal, the building is kept under negative pressure by use of very large vacuum(s) that draw the air through a filter. The building will be kept under negative pressure until the removal/disturbance is complete and until the filter readings test clear. ______________________________ Keep the whole world singing . . . . DanG (remove the sevens) snipped-for-privacy@7cox.net
The microscope used to identify asbestos is very specialized and the use of that microscope to identify asbestos requires specific training to properly identify the various types of asbestos. Even using the correct microscope and with the proper training, it isn't easy. Even the most exhaustive microscopic test (point counting) isn't particularly accurate in terms of the percent of asbestos present.
The suggestion to paint the interior of your house is good. IF there were asbestos fibers on the surfaces, painting them would encapsulate the fibers. When you're through, you'll have a nice, fresh house and, if it'll make you rest easier, it's worth it.
There are folks who can perform wipe tests to determine if there are asbestos fibers present. The place to start is in the room where you did the work. If it's not found there, it's not likely that it's anywhere else. The nice thing about this is that it's not particularly expensive.
The hype over the asbestos threat is greatly overdone, just as was the dioxin threat. Most of the folks who contract asbestosis are those who worked with asbestos under poor hygienic conditions and inhaled a lot of the fibers. Think of all of the homes that have asbestos siding (and sometimes asbestos slate roofs). There are millions of these homes around the country and asbestos fibers are shedding from them constantly. The EPA (and local state departments of natural resources) emphasize it so much because they don't want to err on the minus side, so they make you believe that one inhaled asbestos fiber dooms you. If that were truly the case, we'd all be doomed to die of asbestosis because it's not likely that anyone can go through life and not inhale even one asbestos fiber.
She must have gotten a lot less bat stuff than the ones who work 40-80 hours a week in guano (bat droppings) caves. So that makes it seem like my brother was right, so why does google not have anything about it. Is everything about it too old to be computerized?
I'm sure. But I'm still more interested in the relationship between histo and blindness. Turns out there is ocular histoplasmosis.
Too tired to hunt more, Bill, but it seems there is definitely a relationship between bats and blindness (LOL). I don't know if it is in the guano or not, but I only said "guano miners".
I don't know why blindness and histoplasmosis give hits, and histoplasmosis and bats give hits, but guano and blindness doesn't. Maybe there are hits but they're too far down the list. Histo and blindness gave about 49,000 hits, but searching for all 3 gave only
262 hits.
Here are 3:
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|lang_iw|lang_es&client=firefox-a"In another, 14 healthy young college students developed histoplasmosis when they were exposed to bat guano in a cave in Nicaragua."
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http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:iVpSDFlFB9cJ:
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|lang_iw|lang_es&client=firefox-a"Though bat guano has been sold as a fertilizer and can be useful in some situations, bat droppings are also a major breeding ground for histoplasmosis. Histoplasmosis is a fungus disease contracted through airborne spores in bat droppings. Histoplasmosis symptoms may be anything from a mild influenza to blood abnormalities and fever, or even death. An eye condition has been linked to the bat disease histoplasmosis and can lead to blindness in those who contract it. "
and
Lenhart S. Recommendations for Protecting Workers from Histoplasma capsulatum Exposure During Bat Guano Removal from a Church's Attic. Appl Occup Environ Hyg 1994; 9:230-6.
One of the "house disaster" programs on TLC had a segment on a woman who bought a house (without an inspection) that turned out to have major things wrong with it, and enormous expense was required to fix it. One of the problems was a major bat infestation in the attic. According to the show, she visited an eye doctor who said "I can see histo scarring in your eyes, you've probably had contact with bat feces."
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