The asbestos problem is worse than we thought

[Gregor] They're just everywhere. Whoa, this is really blue. You should come look, this is so blue. [Researcher] Look at how many you're finding. [Gregor] I feel like Gollum, my precious! If it weren't so dangerous, it'd be a fun activity to do. [Researcher] These are the big chunks, so what about all the particles you can't see? This same kind of material was used in the construction of the World Trade Center buildings. And when the towers fell, it was pulverized to microscopic size and released into the air. The particles remained airborne for days and thousands of people unknowingly breathed them in. They buried themselves deep within people's lungs, wreaking havoc and causing all sorts of diseases. We've known for decades that these particles are extremely dangerous, but when the towers fell, no one was warned. The concentrations are such that they don't pose a health hazard. [Gregor] And yet today the diseases linked to that dust have killed more than twice as many people as the attacks themselves. Once we started looking, we kept finding this material in places we never expected. He was telling the newspapers, "People aren't just eating it and breathing it, they're mainlining it." [Gregor] In popular off-roading spots, in makeup, and even kids toys. [Sean] Say It Ain't So Mickey Mouse crayons. No! It's been detected in the dust around schools and homes. Five generations of people died up there. [Gregor] And instead of banning it outright, we let it spread. Some countries are still importing hundreds of thousands of tons each year, and it's estimated that by 2035, nearly 2.8 million people might die because of it. This is a video about a deadly miracle material we can't stop using. This investigation is based on publicly available documents, recordings, and third party sources. All of our links are in the description. Thank you to Ground News for sponsoring this video. More about them later. There is this story about the ancient Greeks from around the second century AD. They had this golden lantern that would burn for a whole year without going out, all because of a very special wick that just wouldn't burn down. So how did they develop this technology? Well, the truth is they didn't, they found it. Imagine you're walking around 2,000 years ago and you see this fluffy looking stuff poking out the ground. It's got all of these fibers that you can pull apart and twist into shapes. [Sean] First off, let's get a nice bundle. So it looks like cotton. [Gregor] It looks like it would burn really well, like it would just- Yeah, you can start a fire with it, right, alright. [Gregor] Okay, let's see what happens. [Sean] It's not burning. That's because this is actually a rock. It's a naturally occurring mineral. The core building block is simple. It's a silicon atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms. Now silicon has four electrons in its outer shell, but it really wants eight. So each of the oxygens shares one electron with it, but oxygen doesn't share evenly since it's more electronegative than silicon, it pulls those shared electrons closer to itself. This leaves the oxygen side slightly negative and the silicon side slightly positive. Now there's an electrostatic attraction between these atoms, which pulls the atoms closer together and strengthens this bond. The result is an incredibly stable pyramid shaped unit called a silica tetrahedron. But if you look at the oxygens in these corner spots, they've only shared one electron, but they actually want two to complete their outer shells. So the corners link up with other silicon atoms to form more tetrahedra. And in this way, the structure just keeps growing. The bonds inside here are incredibly strong and stable, and because the atoms are already tightly bound to the oxygens inside the silicate structure, the oxygen in the air has nothing to react with, so the material doesn't burn. But overall, there's nothing special about these building blocks. More than 90% of the Earth's minerals are made from this stuff, everything from quartz to clay. What makes this material special is how those units link up. Here, the tetrahedra have formed a sheet, and bonded to it there is actually a second sheet made of magnesium atoms and hydroxyl groups, which are just an oxygen and a hydrogen stuck together. Now, the atomic spacings of these two layers are slightly different. So there's a tiny mismatch, which causes tension between these layers causing them to curl up, and you end up with these tiny scroll-like tubes. These tubes don't break down easily under heat. The structure stays stable up to around 600 degrees Celsius. So like all these individual fibers that you see running through here, those are all like these curls? Yes. What is that, what was that there? [Sean] That's just a place where I twisted the fiber with my tweezers. Oh, okay. And when you twist these fibers, they actually don't break. So it's literally a rock you can weave. And when you do, the fibers form a tangled, layered structure. So if heat is introduced, it has to pass from fiber to fiber across many contact points with air filling the spaces between them. This reduces how quickly heat can spread through the material. Because of that, people started weaving it into things like theater curtains and insulation blankets for steam engines, even fireproof clothing, essentially anywhere they didn't want something to catch fire. But by far the most important use came around in the 1800s. Between 1790 and 1870, the number of people living in urban areas in America jumped from 1 in 20 to around 1 in 4. So to accommodate this, people had to tack on extra floors onto existing buildings and courtyards would then be filled with makeshift extensions, effectively tightly packing all of these buildings together. Pretty much all these buildings were made out of wood, but the people inside still cooked with open flames. They used gas lamps, they lit candles. So one accident and an entire neighborhood could go up in flames. That reality hit New York City in December, 1835, when within a span of just two days, three separate fires erupted in Manhattan. One bystander described what followed as "An ocean of fire with roaring, rolling, burning waves." By the end, a third of a mile of Manhattan was engulfed, destroying nearly 700 buildings at a cost of $20 million. That's over $730 million of today's money. Similar catastrophes were happening in cities all over the world, Chicago, London, Hamburg, Tokyo. [Reporter] When will this appalling rate of destruction come to an end? [Gregor] The problem was that when a building burned, it spewed up embers into the air. These then got carried by the wind and landed onto other roofs, setting them alight. So 23 years after the Great Fire of New York, a 21-year-old named Henry Ward Johns set out to break that chain reaction by making roofs fireproof. But that's trickier than it sounds. Whatever his solution was, it had to be usable across an entire city. So cheap and easy enough to mass produce, durable enough to sit exposed on rooftops baking in the summer sun, freezing in the winter, and most importantly, it was not allowed to ignite even when exposed to burning embers. Now, Johns knew of a mineral that was already being spun into fireproof fabric, but only the long fibers were useful for thread. The shorter ones were actually swept aside as waste. Johns realized those scraps were exactly what he needed, fireproof, tough and most importantly, cheap. So he set up a makeshift lab in his basement apartment and started experimenting. He heated up tar in his tea kettle, smeared that onto cloth, and then pressed in these tiny fibers. Then he ringed the whole thing through his wife's brand new clothes ringer, and when he tested it, it worked, it didn't burn. In 1868, Henry Ward Johns patented his invention, and by 1927, the company he built was generating $45 million in annual sales, more than 800 million in today's money. Soon people were using this fire-resistant stuff in all kinds of building materials, across America, consumption grew from around 20,400 tons in 1900 to a peak of 803,000 tons in 1973. Because of that, pretty much every building in the US, public or private, commercial or residential, used some form of this material. During that same period, stronger building codes, safer heating systems and other fire-resistant materials were also introduced, and it showed, during that time, fire-related deaths dropped around 80%. So this material likely helped save millions of lives worldwide. Because it couldn't be destroyed by fire, the name the ancient Greeks gave it, it stuck around. They called it inextinguishable, or asbestos. [Presenter] Asbestos, the remarkable mineral. [Gregor] By the mid 20th century, asbestos was everywhere, inside brake pads, toasters, ironing boards, hair dryers, surgical dressings, and blankets. You know, brewers filtered beer through it. One brand of toothpaste even used it for extra polish, the fake snow in department store windows and in movies like "The Wizard of Oz," all of that's asbestos too. Unusual weather we're having, eh? [Gregor] Sorry, Dorothy. It was such a big deal, Marvel even had a villain called Asbestos Lady. She'd set a fire to escape the police, and she'd easily walk through it, safe inside her asbestos bodysuit. To feed this demand, asbestos was pulled out of the ground on an enormous scale. Major mining operations spread across Canada, Russia, and South Africa with global production peaking at approximately 4.8 million tons per year in 1977. But the reason asbestos ended up in so many different products is because it's actually a group of different minerals. That white, fluffy stuff we tried to burn earlier, it's called chrysotile, and it belongs to a mineral family known as the serpentines. But other types of asbestos looked completely different. For instance, there is also brown asbestos known as amosite. It forms thick fibers that almost look like wood splinters, strong, stable, and highly heat resistant. So it was perfect for putting into building materials like cement panels. This type belongs to a different mineral family, the amphiboles. Here, instead of forming sheets, the silica tetrahedra lock into rigid, ladder-like chains, and in amosite, iron and magnesium ions, along with hydroxyl groups embedded in the structure, bind those chains together, forming these long, needle-like fibers. But tweak that chemistry just slightly so that now iron and sodium ions bind the chains, and you get this, blue asbestos or crocidolite. These crystals split easily along their length and they create these fine flexible fibers that are still extraordinarily strong with tensile strengths comparable to high grade steel wire. This type went into chemical-resistant insulation, shipyards, and even filters inside early gas masks. Oh, and there was another use, one that's hard to believe now. In this magic box I have right here is something that was manufactured right here in North Carolina. They're cigarettes, produced in the 1950s, and if you look at the filter, you see the filters are blue, asbestos. This is Kent with a Micronite filter that was manufactured with crocidolite asbestos in the filter itself. So you're not only smoking, you were smoking it through a blue asbestos filter. Yes, what a deal. Only Kent has the revolutionary new Micronite filter you've heard so much about. Kent and only Kent filters best, filters best, filters best. [Gregor] In the early 1900s, a young woman named Nelly Kershaw worked in a factory that spun asbestos fibers into threads. Every day she breathed in the dust that those machines threw into the air. So by her early thirties, she was so sick she could barely breathe. And when she finally decided to ask the factory for help, they refused, they said helping out workers would set a dangerous precedent. Nelly died shortly after at the age of just 33. Nelly's case caught the attention of pathologist Dr. William Cook. When he opened up her chest, her lungs were gray and scarred, almost blue-black, like they had a huge internal bruise. And when his scalpel passed through them, they rasped. It was like scraping against sandpaper. The tissue was full of mineral grit, and under the microscope the cause was unmistakable, asbestos fibers lodged into the lung tissue. If we were to inhale some type of an asbestos fiber, I kind of want to think of them as like little microscopic straight arrows, they kind of just shoot down through the nose or the mouth and move down through the trachea. If we continue on going down here, we get smaller and smaller as we penetrate deeper into the lung tissue. And then you get into these alveolar sacs, these asbestos fibers, they lodge in the tissue there, and lung secretions, enzymes, even white blood cells, they have a really hard time breaking those down. You end up with scarring deep inside the lungs. In 1924, Dr. Cook published the first medical description of this condition, which became known as asbestosis. When these asbestos fibers lodge into the lungs, the body treats them like invaders, specialized cells called macrophages move in, cells whose job it is to engulf and digest bacteria, dust or debris. But asbestos fibers are too long and stiff to swallow. It's kind of like trying to eat a toothpick sideways. The macrophages keep trying and failing, and in the process, they release inflammatory chemicals that damage the surrounding lung tissue. So workers breathing in asbestos dust day after day, accumulated more and more damage. When doctors sent by the British government examined hundreds of asbestos workers, they found that more than 25% already showed signs of lung disease. And for workers with over 20 years of exposure, that number was closer to 80%. So in 1931, the government officially classified asbestos as a workplace hazard, making it one of the first industrial materials to be regulated for health risks. But the new rules only covered factories where asbestos was manufactured. They didn't extend to other workers like ship builders, miners or construction workers who were regularly exposed to asbestos dust. Across the Atlantic, things weren't much better. There was no binding federal asbestos rules in the States, only a recommendation. The US Public Health Service suggested a temporary exposure limit of 5 million asbestos particles for a single cubic foot of air, which meant that a worker breathing normally could inhale over 300 million asbestos particles an hour and still be considered within guidelines. This became especially problematic for shipyard workers when World War II broke out, ships were packed with asbestos insulation. So workers spent their days cutting and fitting asbestos in thick clouds of fibers. And according to the guidelines of the day, these levels met the official definition of safe working conditions. In fact, asbestos was still marketed as a magic material. A few years earlier, "Time" magazine actually put Johns-Manville's president, Lewis H. Brown on its April 3rd, 1939 cover. But in the early 1960s, finally one doctor started connecting the dots on asbestos. Dr. Irving Selikoff was running a small clinic in Patterson, New Jersey, when the local asbestos workers Union asked if their members could come and see him. Before long, he'd seen multiple workers with either severe lung scarring or more concerningly, an extremely rare cancer called mesothelioma. A mesothelioma is strongly associated with asbestos exposure and is cancer of those cells lining the inside of the chest cavity. And most commonly, it's this pleural cavity. These pleural membranes are aligned with mesothelial cells. Sometimes what happens is the fibers will work their way out of the lung tissue and directly get into this cavity here, and they can literally pierce out the lungs. They cause constant irritation. And over time, that can trigger cancerous changes in the cells that make up those linings. Selikoff needed more data to understand the scale of the problem, but factory owners refused to share medical records from their workers with him. So Selikoff had to get creative. See, during World War II, many shipyard workers employed by the Navy underwent federal background checks. Thousands of these men had been working with asbestos to insulate ships. So using surviving FBI wartime personnel records, Selikoff began tracking them down and one by one painstakingly pieced together their medical histories. What emerged wasn't a handful of isolated tragedies, it was a pattern, that exposure proved deadlier than combat itself. 8.6 out of every 1,000 servicemen were killed in action, whereas 14 out of every 1,000 shipyard workers later died from asbestos-related cancers. Selikoff launched a formal investigation into hundreds of asbestos insulation workers, and what he found confirmed his fears, widespread disabling asbestosis, dozens of cases of mesothelioma, lung cancer rates roughly seven times higher than expected and a threefold increase in gastrointestinal cancers. In 1964, he organized a conference at the New York Academy of Sciences where for the first time, all this evidence was presented publicly in one place, and on the record, it marked the moment when asbestos stopped being seen as a modern miracle material and instead started being recognized as a public health crisis. But the asbestos industry fought back trying to discredit Selikoff. Industry-funded research groups came out with papers minimizing the risk of exposure and framing Selikoff's findings as overblown. They started a coordinated PR effort to discredit him, trying to call him alarmist, and starting a rumor that he wasn't even a real doctor just because he got his medical degree out in Scotland. But Selikoff kept going. He kept publishing data on the devastating health effects of asbestos exposure, he worked 18 hour days documenting every patient who wrote to him. He contacted policymakers, even world leaders, urging them to take action against asbestos. Now Selikoff, the legendary doctor who organized this conference in the 1970s found that intravenous drugs were being contaminated by asbestos filtration. People aren't just eating it and breathing it, they're mainlining it. By the 1970s, no one could deny it any longer, miners, factory workers, shipyard insulators, people who'd been exposed decades earlier during the asbestos boom, were now turning up with multiple cancers in huge numbers. Asbestos exposure is linked to all sorts of different cancers. The lung tissue has lymphatic vessels in it, but you have 'em throughout your whole body. The asbestos fibers sometimes on their own can migrate into the lymphatic vessels. Sometimes the white blood cells will take it into the lymphatic system. Once you hit the lymphatic system, you have the potential to go anywhere in the human body. [Gregor] Autopsies have found fibers in nearly every organ in the body, the brain, bone marrow, spleen, intestines, pancreas, prostate, ovaries, thyroid, and liver. And in every tissue those fibers reach, they set off the same chain reaction. I'm imagining these white blood cells with personalities, and they get all mad and frustrated because they can't engulf this asbestos fiber. They've coined this term called essentially, frustrated phagocytosis. They start releasing these things like reactive oxygen species. They can cause damage to surrounding cells, and really important is damage to DNA. Those cells can start dividing out of control when they start to clump together, and we start to call those clumps of cells cancer. US courts were flooded with lawsuits against companies like Johns-Manville. The harm asbestos caused was well documented. The information was out there. Companies should have known their products were dangerous. They should know what's reasonably available in the public domain about the dangers of asbestos. If they can read asbestos patents, they can read asbestos pathology papers. But the companies denied it. What was needed was definitive evidence that the companies knew their products were killing their workers. Then an attorney, Carl Ash, noticed something strange in the 1974 report by this huge asbestos company called Raybestos Manhattan. See, in this report, the company suggested that they had actually been investigating health hazards of asbestos since the 1930s. So Ash started digging. He filed a request for internal documents, and at first, the company claimed it couldn't find much. Then unexpectedly, Ash was handed a banker's box stuffed full of documents, meticulously kept by Raybestos Manhattan's former president, Sumner Simpson. Back in 1935, a journal contacted Simpson because they wanted to write an article about asbestosis. Shortly after, Simpson himself reached out to Johns-Manville's lawyer, Vandiver Brown, saying, "I think the less said about asbestos, the better off we are." To which Brown replied, "I quite agree with you that our interests are best served by having asbestosis receive the minimum of publicity." The same papers also revealed that in the 1930s, Raybestos and Johns-Manville hired an external company, Saranac Laboratories, to do studies of asbestos on animals. But the companies insisted on controlling what from those studies will be made public. As a letter from Vandiver points out, "It is our further understanding that the results will be considered the property of those who are advancing the required funds, who will determine whether, to what extent and in what manner they shall be made public." A clause to which Saranac Laboratories said, "Yes." But after their lead researcher who was compiling all this evidence died in 1946, the companies agreed that nothing should be published that contained any objectionable material. Objectionable meaning any sort of indication that asbestos causes cancer. So when Saranac Laboratories finished their research, the companies took the report, edited it, and just buried the evidence. Here's an original copy of that manuscript, and you can find whole sections just crossed out. Other documents were even more damaging. A Johns-Manville medical official later testified that up until 1971, the company had a policy of not telling their workers if their physicals showed signs of asbestosis or asbestos-related lung cancers. And in sworn testimony, a witness recalled a meeting they had in the early 1940s with the president of Johns-Manville, asking why they weren't warning workers about asbestos. As the witness recalls it, they asked, "Do you mean to tell me you would let them work until they dropped dead?" To which the president replied, "Yes, we save a lot of money that way." Once the Sumner Simpson papers got out, they unlocked a new industrial Watergate. The industry's standard, "Oh, we didn't know," defense, it simply fell apart. Comparisons were made to big tobacco's concealment of smoking risks. And the lawsuits surged, each case brought new discovery and each round of discovery exposed a wider, more coordinated coverup. Ever since the word asbestosis started showing up in medical journals in the 1920s, Johns-Manville went out to secure the market around itself. First, they acquired the biggest rock wall company, then they acquired a firm holding the key patents to calcium silicate insulation, insulation that could be made without asbestos. Now, at the same time, companies that had non asbestos insulation were incentivized into creating asbestos product lines. With each acquisition or inducement, another potential competitor lost the ability to denounce asbestos and say, "Oh, we have an asbestos-free product." So each in turn became a member of this conspiracy of silence. That is how the asbestos industry guaranteed its survival, by ensuring no one could speak out against it. [Narrator] We suggest you consider asbestos for the walls of your home. Their business decisions and the people who make them are businessmen. I mean, the word morality or moral obligation is almost non-existent in the corporate documents. In 1982, Johns-Manville filed for bankruptcy protection. Manville Corporation's board of directors has determined that the corporation should file for reorganization under chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Act. Not because they were broke, but in a move widely seen as a way to shield the company from a flood of asbestos lawsuits. Despite all the evidence against them, Johns-Manville survived. They continue operating to this day, although they no longer produce asbestos. Between 1940 and 1980, the asbestos industry, led by Johns-Manville, exposed roughly 21 million Americans to these fibers. Asbestos related deaths amounted to at least 8 to 10,000 people every year, with many more suffering lifelong disease. In 1989, the EPA issued a rule to phase out almost all asbestos use in the United States. And that should have been the end of the story. But the industry sued immediately, not because anyone disputed asbestos causes cancer, that was undeniable by this point, but because of a legal technicality. See, under the law, the EPA had to prove that an outright ban of asbestos was the only solution. And that anything less than that just wouldn't cut it. This was an almost impossible feat. Now, the industry argued that they hadn't done that, and unfortunately the US courts agreed. So in 1991, they ruled that the EPA just hadn't met this narrow legal standard. And with that, the asbestos ban was dead in the water. But by then, asbestos had become so financially and legally risky for the companies that manufactured it or used it, that its overall use did actually decline. Yet in the end, after years of trying to define and regulate asbestos, the only thing that truly stuck around was a definition and a narrow one. Chrysotile and five amphiboles, because these were the only ones being mined, sold, and used in factories. But those six became the official asbestos minerals and anything else, no matter how fiber-like or potentially dangerous, well, that doesn't count. [Reporter] The FDA for the first time in 50 years, considering testing for asbestos in cosmetics and talc powder. [Reporter] Traces of it have now been detected in children's play sand. Thousands of people are claiming that they developed various forms of cancer after years of using Johnson and Johnson's baby powder. Is this all the stuff that you've collected over the years? No, it's not all of it, but this box is full of all the Claire's-labeled products that I found asbestos in. Everything little girls could possibly want to have their makeup in. Like, oh, I don't know, how about sparkly boxes, right? Yeah. And there's a cell phone. With eye shadows on it. There's asbestos in there. There's asbestos in the unicorn. It's in all of that? All of these have asbestos in them. I started seeing asbestos fibers everywhere. Everywhere, okay. The eyeshadows, the blush, they all had asbestos fibers. Alright, wow. okay. What year was this? 2017. [Gregor] What? I thought it was gonna be like 1980 or something. What, 2017? Whoa. And the manufacturer came back and said, "There's no way." And they sponsored another laboratory to look at the same samples. And they said, "No, none of this counts as asbestos." It's all cleavage fragments, or CPLA, clay or something like that. And it was balderdash, right? I called friends all across the States and said, "Hey, do you have a Claire's store near you? Can you find the sparkly box? And send it to me, pronto." There's Claire's in all of the malls, all across America. And then I look further and it's all over the world. I mean, every mall, everywhere. And I end up testing Claire's from Brazil to Japan to London, I found asbestos. No way. Right. So that turned into a huge story, right? And now I don't think you can buy very much talc-based cosmetics at Claire's now, but it was a several-years-long battle. These are different products that were sold at toy stores. Like here's the secret spy kit. And you see there's a fingerprint kit there, right? And in that fingerprint kit was a powder in which I found asbestos fibers. Say It Ain't So Mickey Mouse crayons. No! I found asbestos in those. And this keeps happening. Just a couple of months ago, around 70 schools in Australia and New Zealand had to close down because of the asbestos found. Out of the 60 outlets that reported on this story, only 24% were from right-leaning sources. Depending on where you get your news, this might have never crossed your radar, which is a problem because public health information like this shouldn't fall through the cracks. And this is why we've asked Ground News to sponsor this video. They compile news from outlets all over the world into one place so that you can easily see the partisan split and with their color-coded layout, it's also easy to sort your news by factuality, ownership and source so that you can see how a story like this is getting covered side by side with all the context you need. Take these two headlines for example, this article from the "Herald Sun" only talks about the fear of asbestos, while this very high factuality source firmly states that asbestos was found in decorative sand, that difference matters, I would like to know whether the concern is over a mere suspicion or actual asbestos contamination, and that's why I find Ground News so useful. You get the full picture, not just one headline sensationalizing for clicks. And they also have a dedicated blind spot feed for stories like these that are, you know, disproportionately covered by either side of the political spectrum, all to help people avoid their echo chambers. Now, we partnered up with Ground News because we share the same mission, getting to the truth, and that's why we're offering 40% off their vantage plan at ground.news/ve. So if you wanna support the channel, but also want a clearer understanding of the world, check out that link in the description, or you can also scan this QR code. So I wanna thank Ground News for sponsoring this part of the video, and now let's go figure out why asbestos is even getting into all these consumer products. Now, no one is intentionally putting asbestos in makeup or kids' toys, so how did something we know is deadly just end up everywhere? Well, it's an unfortunate consequence of where asbestos forms and nowhere makes that more clear than Libby, Montana. It kind of breaks my heart to talk about it. The mine up there is vermiculite mine. It's about five six miles north. Vermiculite is a mineral that is used in everything from insulation to fireproofing to potting soil. On its own, it's harmless. The problem was, Libby's vermiculite formed mixed in with amphibole asbestos fibers. And the same thing happens with other minerals we mine, including stuff like talc. That's how asbestos ends up in products like the ones we saw at Sean's lab. And the worst part, the company that owned and operated the mine, W.R. Grace, they knew, they knew the ore contained asbestos. They knew people were getting sick and they didn't warn the town. In fact, they tried to cover it up for almost 30 years. They had hundreds of workers in there. And of course, when the miners would go home, they had dust all over their clothes, and their kids and their wives got it and died as well. But the doctors up around Libby, they knew, boy did they know. Besides the lung disease and cancers long associated with asbestos exposure, researchers were also finding rates of some autoimmune diseases were nearly six times higher than the national average. And by the time the Libby situation hit the headlines in 1999, reporters documented nearly 200 deaths in a town of fewer than 3,000. And it could take 20 years for it to go, but pretty soon you have no breath at all and you die of asphyxiation. I could tell I'm talking on the phone by somebody's voice, how far along they were toward death, because none of 'em survived. Finally, in 2009, the EPA declared a public health emergency in Libby, calling it "The worst case of industrial poisoning of a community in US history." But Libby's just the tip of the iceberg, because for decades, W.R. Grace shipped Libby vermiculite around the country, and with it, deadly amphibole asbestos, which ended up in millions of homes as attic insulation. And Grace also made a fireproof spray that was used on the steel frames of high-rise buildings. By 1970, over half of the multi-story buildings erected in the United States used this fireproof spray, including the World Trade Center. But this spray was actually marketed as asbestos-free. According to a later investigation by the "New York Times," Grace lobbied regulators to adopt a threshold under which products containing less than 1% of asbestos would not be regulated. Grace argued that the danger of such small amounts had not been proved. This became known as the 1% rule or the Grace Rule. That decision didn't just affect the products from Libby's mine, it reshaped how asbestos was detected, regulated, and ignored everywhere. [Speaker] Oh my God! Look at the shadow of death! Okay, when that went down, I knew it. I knew they had asbestos, and so I started calling. I said, "What do you, how are you gonna protect people from that, 'cause now that stuff's all over the place. You saw the dust clouds, right?" [Gregor] September 11th became the largest real world test of asbestos detection following a single catastrophic event. The dust is so thick you can't see. When the EPA began sampling the dust and analyzing it, they chose a method we use back at the lab called polarized light microscopy or PLM. But the PLM has two major limitations. First, it struggles to detect asbestos if it's less than 1% by weight in the sample, and second, it can only see the fibers that are roughly longer than about five micrometers or wider than about a quarter of a micrometer. As a result, the smallest and oftentimes the most dangerous fibers, like the ones pulverized during the collapse of the towers, are difficult to detect using just the PLM. To reliably find these, you need transmission electron microscopy or TEM. [Sean] Where we top out of about a thousand times with light microscopy, this tops out at about a million times. But what we need to see is just what are the finest fibers that potentially can go into your lung. [Gregor] Without having used a TEM, the EPA declared New York's air safe. Everything we've tested for, which includes asbestos, lead, and VOCs have been below any level of concern for the general public health. [Gregor] But some researchers after 911 actually did do studies with TEM. They found asbestos levels far above the EPA's own safety thresholds in most of their samples. And the report also warned that because many of these fibers were actually smaller than normal, they were especially dangerous. They posted the results on the American Industrial Hygiene Association website, but within hours, their post disappeared. Less than 24 hours later, the researchers were notified they'd been taken off the job and were no longer required at Ground Zero. One former EPA chief investigator later went on CBS saying they believe the agency had deliberately used the wrong testing methods and downplayed the danger. New York City directly lied about the test results for asbestos in air. When they finally released them, they doctored the result. We don't know if that's true, but to be clear, PLM is still widely used to detect asbestos because it's faster, it's cheaper, it's easier to deploy. But what we do know is two things. First, the PLM method was not sensitive enough to detect whether there were asbestos fibers in the dust at Ground Zero. And second, the EPA did have other, more sensitive methods available to them. Whatever the motives, the result was the same. New Yorkers were told that the air was safe when it really wasn't. And as of December, 2023, 6,781 of those who have been registered with the World Trade Center Health Program have died either of an illness or a cancer linked just to their time being around Ground Zero. But even if the EPA had used the TEM, the answer would still not be simple because even then researchers run into a more basic problem. What actually counts as asbestos? Is there asbestos in the air? Is there asbestos in the soil? Is there asbestos in the water? Is there asbestos in the body? All of those counting rules are based on fibers that are not super-long, but they're way longer than the vast majority of say, Libby amphibole fibers and the vast majority of fibers that are inhaled. So they're not even counting those, they're not even looking for them. The ways that we are right now telling people whether they're being exposed or not is a lie! [Gregor] And when longer fibers break forming these so-called cleavage fragments, they don't count either. Yeah, there's a whole effort to say, "Oh yeah, if it's been broken, it's not dangerous." But there are so many papers out there that show that if you put pure cleavage fragments into mice, they get very, very sick. [Gregor] This really matters when you're in a place like this and you realize the dust could be considered asbestos-contaminated under one definition, and perfectly safe under another. [Researcher] Nobody would've expected to find asbestos here. [Gregor] To be clear, there were no asbestos mines in Nevada, no industrial sites, no history of asbestos commercial use at all. But geologists, Brenda Buck and Rod Metcalf found asbestos spread across approximately 1 million acres outside Las Vegas. [Rod] Geologic processes transport these materials. And you know, before the erosion started, they were just in the bedrocks along the mountain front. Now they're in sediments down there, in the stream here. [Brenda] And the problem with the naturally occurring stuff like this is it may be only a small percentage in the rock and even a smaller percentage in the soil, but this stuff gets in the air. [Gregor] Entire communities might be breathing it in and getting sick without knowing. So Brenda and Rod tried to warn people. Back in late 2012, they compiled all of their findings for a presentation at the Conference of the Geological Society of America. But before the conference even began, the abstract caught the attention of a journalist who reported on the story, and that's when the pushback started. Soon the state of Nevada sent a cease and desist letter, and officials questioned Brenda and Rod's methods. So if you go to Las Vegas, you're gonna get exposed to asbestos that they didn't want that out there. Every time I drove into Boulder City, there was an official tailing me within a minute. The message was clear, don't look any further. Well, we did decide to look further. So we drove out into the desert to a popular off-roading spot to test whether there really is asbestos in the dust around Las Vegas. Okay, I'm strapped into a dune buggy here. I'm going to go down in that basin, and Sean's strapped up some dust collectors with receivers in my breathing zone so we can actually figure out how much asbestos I would be inhaling through the dust that I kick up. Woo! You see those donuts, huh? [Sean] Yeah, yeah, you were ripping it up down there. [Gregor] Yeah, from a geological point of view, any notes? It rained today. I thought about that while I was watching, I was like, "There might not be much dust," but these are the air samples that were hanging in your breathing room, right? Yes, yeah, yeah. And I looked at them and the filters have some tanning on them. Oh, that's good. Which means we actually did get some dust. We don't know what's in it yet, but there's something in there. But the original plan was for us to actually do this at the dry lake bed just outside Boulder City, because this is where people do the majority of their off-roading, you know, they camp, they do photo shoots, even take their wedding photos, except not on the day that we were there. Okay, we're out here on the dry lake bed, supposedly in Las Vegas, where on the one day that we're here, the lake has decided not to be dry in any sort of definition. Oh my God. And so what we're gonna go do is suit up, get some samples, and figure out how much asbestos there really is in this stuff. [Sean] Okay. We're gonna do a third. Let's go out to that island. Okay. Okay, got the samples. Next step, take 'em to the lab. Great to see you guys again. Yeah, good to see you too. Well, we are here for one thing I suppose, like what kind of results did we get? Now the big reveal, drum roll please. I did the dune buggy air samples first. Those samples that you had on your left and right shoulders, I didn't find any asbestos fibers. Okay, well, I guess that's a bit of a relief. I'm glad we did the demonstration and I'm kind of glad we didn't find anything because I'm pretty sure I took my mask off at a few points. I've been in those shoes, like, we didn't find anything. Oh, but wait a minute, I was breathing that (beep). Exactly. So what about the samples in the dry lake bed? Ah, another drum roll. Okay. I found amphibole asbestos. Wow, okay. It's there. It is there. I counted up a number of fibers, the area of the filter they analyzed, and I figured out that we had between 30 and 50 million asbestos structures per gram of mud that we were walking through. Just to think that we pulled off to the side of the road, walked what, 30 meters, took three samples, and all of them had these incredibly high concentrations of asbestos right there, it's not like we had to go out and find. Very wet soil was lucky for us because we know there's asbestos in that soil. Now think about the guys that go taking their jeep across there when it is a dry lake. I mean, that was our initial plan to do the dune bugging there. And I can't like help but think about people drive down that road all the time. They must pull over, they must go down there, like just kick dust and rocks and- [Sean] We know they do. We know they do. And there's no sign to tell you that there's anything wrong with the dry lake. It's not like we, you know, discovered this, this has been available data since- [Sean] October of 2013 is the actual publication date of naturally occurring asbestos, potential for human exposure in Southern Nevada by Brenda Buck et al. So 13 years we've had this data. It's not like we'd rediscovered anything. And that's the other thing that's really hard about this science. You need the public to be aware, but you don't want to terrify them. And so how do you find the right way? [Gregor] This will potentially be seen by tens of millions of people. So is there a message you want to get out? This is a natural hazard, just like a lot of things in your life, it's really good for people to know whether or not their house is in a flooding zone, right? It's really good to know about earthquake risks. It's really good to know about hurricanes and tornadoes. Well, this is just another natural hazard, and if you have the information, then you can make better decisions to live a healthier life. [Gregor] One big problem is that asbestos in the real world doesn't line up with how it's regulated. Take this fiber, it comes from a sample of the same blue asbestos from the site outside Las Vegas we visited at the start of the video. [Sean] I think we have two different phases, at least of amphibole here because if it's yellow in this orientation, but also blue in this orientation in the same fiber bundle, then we have a change in the phase from here to here. [Gregor] So this one fiber is actually two minerals. And that complexity shows up in its structure too, under the electron microscope, one side could meet the definition of asbestos, the other may not simply because of its shape. So one single fiber could fall within one of the six named and regulated asbestos minerals if you look at one side, but the other would be completely unregulated. Your lungs don't care about these categories, though. [Narrator] The asbestos fiber, you'll find it everywhere. No ordinary rock, no single rock indeed, but a group of related minerals with characteristics in common, but in varying degrees. Most experts will say, "Asbestos isn't a mineral or a geologic term, it's a commercial one," but that's symbolics. Why do I say that? Because it's not just a commercial term. We now know that asbestos can kill you. So if we're gonna say that, we have to define it based on health effect, and we don't. [Gregor] So what are we actually doing about it? The system was so complex, it was so burdensome that our country hasn't even been able to uphold a ban on asbestos, a known carcinogen that kills as many as 10,000 Americans every year. [Gregor] Well, in 2016, Congress did try to fix this broken system. They passed an amendment giving the EPA new power to evaluate and restrict dangerous chemicals, including asbestos. I think it's time to sign the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act into law. [Gregor] But then progress stalled, again. Under the Trump administration, efforts to strengthen asbestos rules slowed dramatically. Trump had publicly praised asbestos for years. A lot of people in my industry think asbestos is the greatest fireproofing material ever, ever made! It wasn't until 2024 that the US finally banned chrysotile asbestos. But this ban doesn't cover the other five types of asbestos, and it still allows some manufacturers up to 12 years to phase it out. It doesn't address what to do with asbestos already in schools and homes and other buildings, nor does it fix any of the numerous classification, identification, and detection loopholes, and it doesn't address the asbestos in the environment. On top of that, the EPA is already getting sued, again. There have been tremendous forces from commercial industries to make it sound like it's not as bad as it is, and to find ways to allow them to continue to use the material. This is a sad, sad fact of our decision-making in our country and other countries, is that it's driven by money. But at least the United States are going for some level of moderation. Other countries are not that lucky. In 2019, India imported more than 350,000 tons of asbestos, and it's predicted that in the upcoming decades, 6 million people there might develop asbestos-related diseases. And similar things are happening in many of the other countries in Asia. We've actually found this website where it looks like you can just buy asbestos cloth made in China, but please don't. And all of the asbestos that we've already mined, even after we stop using it, it's still out there. Asbestos doesn't naturally decay in the environment. So should you be worried? Well, having asbestos in your house doesn't automatically mean that it's dangerous. If you have asbestos in your ceiling and you don't drill into it, you're probably gonna be fine. Asbestos is an issue if the particles go airborne, but who knows which house has asbestos, where all of that asbestos is, who's gonna take care of it and how? So a lot of the answers to these questions just don't exist yet. But if you're worried about asbestos exposure for yourself, check out the links that we've put in the description. I think a big part of the problem is that people assume asbestos is a solved issue. And I'll be the first to admit, I fell for that line of thinking. Here's the ending I wrote for our PFAS video. We've been here before with lead gasoline, Freon and asbestos, and each time we did the research and made the right decision to phase these chemicals out. Yeah, I was completely oblivious. We will look back at our history and what do we do with tobacco? Everybody was smoking, right? It would be improper for me to not offer an ashtray even if I wasn't a smoker back in the day. And all the scientists working for the big cigarette companies said, "Why, tobacco never hurt anybody." But because of the outcry and the recognition that smoking causes disease, everybody knows someone who died because of cigarettes, right? Now, you might find out that asbestos-related disease has touched you in some way, you don't even know yet. I didn't know my grandfather died because of asbestos, that my father is dying more likely than not because of asbestos. Did I know that when I started looking at asbestos under a microscope, no. Did I know that when I changed the brakes on the Jeeps that I ran around in, no. Did I know that when I ran around through asbestos-containing dust, no. Now I do. Pretty much every scientist and journalist we spoke to for this video said the same thing. This is a hard story to get out there. They've faced economic pressure, political pressure, the research got buried, and some people even received death threats for reporting on the story. It is an uncomfortable topic, but I think it's these uncomfortable topics that matter the most, that have the potential to do the most good, yet they are also the ones that are the most uncomfortable to watch. So I really appreciate you for sticking around to the end and facing the truth, making yourself aware and becoming part of the solution. So perhaps now more than ever, thank you for watching.