[OT] Xmas artificial snow from the 40s

They weren't mad, they didn't know. Same as today.

NT

Greek geographer Strabo noted a "sickness of the lungs" in slaves who wove asbestos into cloth. Pliny the Elder wrote of the "disease of slaves," and actually described the use of a thin membrane from the bladder of a goat or lamb used by the slave miners as an early respirator in an attempt to prot ect them from inhaling the harmful asbestos fibers as they labored.

As early as 1897, an Austrian doctor attributed pulmonary troubles in one o f his patients to the inhalation of asbestos dust.

In 1906, the first documented death of an asbestos worker from pulmonary fa ilure was recorded by Dr. Montague Murray at London?s Charring Cros s Hospital.

But you can still buy it in the USA:

Asbestos is still not banned in the United States. A 1989 ruling issued by the Environmental Protection Agency banning most asbestos-containing produc ts was overturned by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans in 1

all from

Owain

I had a friend who died recently from asbestos related lung cancer.

Some gas masks were made out of asbestos.

My mum was a factory inspector in 1950's. At that point, it was known by people like factory inspectors, but not accepted by all factory owners/managers.

She told me about one case she had to investigate - a young (teenage I think) girl who got asbestosis. She had never been in a factory, but her father worked in a factory handling asbestos, and came home in his factory clothes each evening, which were visibly covered in the dust. She almost certainly got it from that.

Horrible :(

There is actually a warning on a council's website (forget which one, might have been Derby) about not using old decorations found in lofts due to the fact that apparently asbestos was used with general abandon.

I thought the majority of what was on the floor was mostly made of cornflakes painted white to get the crispyness in films when walking through the 'snow' in hollywood anyway.

In studios maybe - but the above was probably on sale in Woolworths for household use!

In message , harry writes

Oh joy. I regularly wore my Grandfather's WWII gas mask, as a child.

Quite fortunate it was fireproof, if you were also using lots of fairy lights on a stalactite of adapters.

Owain

More likely to be a stalagmite. Although that has just conjured up a vision of a whole stack of those Y-shaped BC adaptors (and BC plugs) descending from a light fitting...

That's what I was thinking of.

Owain

When I was 14, our geography teacher was telling us about a country - I've no idea what or where - in which Gastric Ulcers was a major cause of death amongst workers in the asbestos mining industry.

I don't remember a thing about the rest of the lesson - I just sat there stunned.

I knew that when my father died when I was 3? that he died of gastric ulcers.

His death certificate listed his employment as: Labourer (Asbestos Factory). I'd never known of the connection before.

Apart from any asbestos fibres that might have clung to his clothes, we had a white edging to our garden path which, I later found, was simply rows of bricks covered with asbestos cement!

When some of this later got broken I noticed that the underside was all furry ...

However, I've reached 72 without any problems that might be attributed to asbestos so I must have been very lucky.

Asbestos won't cause ulcers. The cause of ulcers is bacteria, (Only recently discovered)

Asbestos causes a very special sort of lung cancer (Mesothelioma). Having this sort of cancer is what all these asbestos compensation claims are based on.