Kicking the Sacred Cow

by James P. Hogan

  On this basis, if regulatory authorities set their exposure limits too low, i.e., to the left of where the J bottoms out, then reducing levels to comply with them can actually make things worse. In a study of homes across 1,729 U.S. counties, Bernard Cohen, professor of physics and radiation health at the University of Pittsburgh, has found a correlation between radon levels and lung cancer mortality almost as high as that for cigarette smoking. Except, it's in the opposite direction: As radon goes up, cancer goes down. 218

  Perhaps radioactive tablets for those who don't get enough regular exposure wouldn't be a bad idea. Or a good use for radioactive waste might be to bury it underneath radon-deficient homes. And perhaps cereal manufacturers should be required to state on their boxes the percentage of the daily dietary requirement that a portion of their product contributes. After all, if radiation is essential for health in minimum, regular amounts, it meets the accepted definition of a vitamin.

  Rip-Out Rip-Off: The Asbestos Racket

  Authorities . . . are the curse of science; and do more to interfere with the scientific spirit than all its enemies.

  — Thomas Huxley, (C. Bibby: T. H. Huxley: Humanist and Educator)

  Sometimes, environmentalist crusades result from good, old-fashioned, honest greed, seizing an opportunity created by fanatical regulators.

  Asbestos and the WTC Towers

  Readers who visit my website at www.jamesphogan.com will be aware that I maintain a "bulletin board" there, carrying postings on scientific and topical issues that catch my interest and seem worth sharing, and anything else that takes my fancy. I didn't put anything up there when the September 11 event occurred, since it seemed that everyone in the world was already airing opinions of every conceivable stripe, and there wasn't much to add. However, I did find myself getting a bit irked as time went by, and criticisms began surfacing that the architects and engineers responsible for the World Trade Center (WTC) "should have designed it to be able to take things like that." Well, they did. Both towers withstood the impacts as they were supposed to. What brought them down was the fire. And it turns out that the designers had done a professional and competent job of providing against that eventuality too, but their work was negated by over-hasty bureaucracy being pushed by environmentalist junk science.

  The structural steel used in skyscrapers loses most of its strength when red hot. To provide thermal protection, buildings like the Empire State and others from the prewar era enclosed the steel support columns in a couple of feet of concrete. This was effective but it added a lot of weight and cost, while also consuming a substantial amount of interior space. In 1948, Herbert Levine developed an inexpensive, lightweight, spray-on insulation composed of asbestos and rock wool, which played a key part in the postwar office-tower construction boom. Buildings using it would tolerate a major fire for four hours before structural failure, allowing time for evacuation of the building below the fire and airlift by helicopters from the roof for people trapped above. By 1971, when the two WTC towers were being built, the country was being beset by various environmentalist scare campaigns, one of which was the demonization of asbestos. When the use of asbestos was banned, Levine's insulation had already been installed in the first sixty-four floors. The newer lightweight construction didn't permit using the traditional heavy concrete insulation for the remaining fifty-four floors, and so a non-asbestos substitute was jury-rigged to complete the buildings. On studying the arrangement, Levine said, "If a fire breaks out above the sixty-fourth floor, that building will fall down." He was right.

  I finally put an item up on the bulletin board in May, 2002, giving the gist of the above and also commenting that it was all a result of baseless hysteria, and there had never been a shred of evidence that insulating buildings with asbestos was harmful to health. A number of readers wrote to say that they hadn't been aware that the whole things was a scam, and asked for more details. I posted a follow-up piece accordingly, and since it seems relevant to the subject matter of this part of the book, I thought I'd include it here too.

  Insulated from Reality

  In the late 1960s, Dr. Irving Selikoff of the Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, published a study of lung cancers among insulation workers. 219 Although the figures indicted cigarette smoking as the primary culprit by far, media accounts played up the asbestos connection and hyped the "one-fiber-can-kill" mantra that was being repeated widely at the time—essentially the same false notion that we came across with low-level radiation. By 1978 the ensuing misrepresentations and exaggerations formed the basis of an OSHA report that predicted 58,000 to 73,000 cancer deaths each year from asbestos, on the basis of which the government upped its estimate of industry-related cancers from 2 percent to 40 percent. 220 A full-blown epidemic had become reality, and the witch-hunt was on. Mining in the U.S. Southwest ceased. Over a dozen companies were forced into bankruptcy by tens of thousands of tort cases, clogging the courts and costing thousands of jobs. An Emergency Response Act was passed by Congress mandating removal from over 700,000 schools and other buildings, worded such as to levy the cost on the school system, diverting tens of billions of dollars away from education. Many private and parochial schools were forced to close.

  Yet ten years later the forecast of 58,000–73,000 deaths had been reduced to 13–15 (yes, a dozen-odd, not thousands), which the New Orleans-based Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out in November 1988, because the EPA was unable to their satisfaction to substantiate even that figure. But by then a lucrative legal and removal industry worth an estimated $150–200 billion had come into being that many interests were not about to let go away. So the country continued to witness such absurdities as space-suited OSHA workers conducting tests of air samples among unprotected children in school buildings where the fiber content of the air was lower than in the street outside. After walls were torn down and the insulation removed, levels of airborne asbestos measured up to forty thousand times higher than it had been before—remaining so for months afterward.

  But the whole nonsense, it turns out, traces back to phobia of a word. "Asbestos" is a generic name for a family of several types of related but distinct materials. And as with mushrooms, the particular type one is dealing with makes the world of a difference.

  Ninety-five percent of the asbestos ever used in the U.S. and Canada, and 100 percent of that mined there, is the "chrysotile," or "white" form, well suited to building insulation, auto brake linings, cement, and the like on account of its strength and fire resistance. It consists of a tubular fiber that is dissolved and expelled by the lungs, and represents a negligible cancer hazard—21,500 times less than cigarettes, according to a Harvard study. 221 Exposure over many years to the high concentrations that existed in the unregulated workplace in times gone by can, it is true, lead to the lung condition known as asbestosis, where the tissue becomes fibrous and ceases functioning. But similar problems exist with heavy concentrations of coal or silica dust, baking flour, or any other dusty environment, whatever the material. No excess cancers above the population average have been found from exposure to the chrysotile variety of asbestos.

  The other significant form is crocidolite, also known as "blue asbestos," a hard, needlelike fiber that lodges in the tissues and is deadly. As little as three months of exposure can result in fatal cancers not only of the lungs but also the body cavities. It is mined only in South Africa, and was used during the 1930s and '40s in such demanding areas as warship construction, causing cancers among shipyard workers that became apparent only in later years. So the true problem, while real, is one of the past.

  But the EPA legislators ignored this distinction and classified all asbestos equally as a carcinogen, despite being told of these differences in scientific reports submitted in 1978, 1979, and 1984, and severe criticism from Science and The Lancet. Sir Richard Doll, the Oxford epidemiologist who proved the causal link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, wrote of their decision, "No arguments based even loosely on [these estimate
s] should be taken seriously. It seems likely that whoever wrote the OSHA paper did so for political rather than scientific reasons." 222 Quite perspicacious, possibly. In the late 1980s, the EPA director involved became president of one of the largest asbestos abatement companies in the United States.

  A statistician who helped produce the original OSHA paper later lamented of the fiasco, "We did what scientists so often do, which was to use . . . estimates without questioning them." 223 Wrong. It's what regulators bent on advancing a political ideology do, not scientists interested in facts.

  In this connection, it should also be recalled that the O-ring failure that was finally pinpointed as the cause of the Challenger shuttle disaster occurred with the first use of a replacement for the original sealant putty, well suited to the task, that had been used safely in all prior shuttle missions and seventy-seven successful Titan III rocket launches. So why was it replaced? Under EPA regulations it had to be phased out because it contained asbestos—as if astronauts are going to climb out of a spacecraft and start snorting it.

  Makers and Takers

  So bureaucrats and sloppy legislators prosper, while people who actually produce something useful are thrown out of work, schools are closed or robbed of their funding, and competently designed structures and systems are sabotaged by incompetents. I hadn't followed the asbestos story after the eighties, until my attention was drawn to its connection with the WTC tragedy. Since the press seemed to have gotten the facts straight finally, I had naively assumed that the matter was effectively ended, the damage consigned to the endless catalog of past silliness. And then I came across an article by Arthur Robinson in the November 2002 issue of his newsletter, Access to Energy, entitled "Goodbye to Union Carbide." The extracts below need no comment.

  Union Carbide, now a division of Dow Chemical, has many plants that provide numerous useful plastics and other essential synthetic materials to American industry and individuals. My father designed and supervised the construction of some of these Union Carbide plants.

  "Dow Chemical Held Responsible In Asbestos Cases" by Susan Warren in The Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2002, p. A6, reports, however, that the scourge of asbestos litigation has now hit Union Carbide. A Charleston, West Virginia, jury has ruled in favor of no less than 2,000 'plaintiffs' in finding that Union Carbide operated unsafe facilities from 1945 to 1980.

  Regardless of Dow's best legal efforts, this is the beginning of the end for another American corporation. Asbestos, useful and safe, was used throughout American industry for more than a century. It was also used in nearly every research laboratory in the United States for everything from lab benches to fume hoods. We suppose that when these leeches are finished with American industry, they will go after the endowments of our universities too. . . .

  Why conduct military operations against terrorists abroad when we are allowing people with no better principles to destroy our country in American courts? The "asbestos lawyers" are doing more damage to the United States than all the terrorists on Earth will ever do. . . . If, however, the legal profession continues to refuse to police itself, this problem will continue to worsen.

  It will be no pleasure to watch my father's life's work along with that of the tens of thousands of productive men and women who built Union Carbide ruined by these reprehensible thieves who have perverted and are destroying America's legal system as well.

  SIX

  CLOSING RANKS

  AIDS Heresy In The Viricentric Universe

  Sometimes a deception cannot be prevented from running its course, even at terrible cost, until eventually it collides with reality.

  — Phillip Johnson

  Maybe someday AIDS experts will be as well informed as they are well funded.

  — Christine Maggiore, director, Alive and Well

  Science is supposed to be concerned with objective truth—the way things are, that lie beyond the power of human action or desires to influence. Facts determine what is believed, and the consequences, good or bad, fall where they may. Politics is concerned with those things that are within human ability to change, and in the realm of politics, beliefs are encouraged that advance political agendas. All too often in this case, truth is left to fall where it may.

  When the hysteria over AIDS broke out in the early eighties, I was living in the mother lode country in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California. Since I had long dismissed the mass media as a credible source of information on anything that mattered, I didn't take a lot of notice. A close friend and drinking buddy of mine at that time was a former Air Force physicist who helped with several books that I worked on there. Out of curiosity we checked the actual figures from official sources such as various city and state health departments. The number of cases for the whole of California turned out to be somewhere between 1,100 and 1,200, and these were confined pretty much totally to a couple of well-defined parts of San Francisco and Los Angeles associated with drugs and other ways of life that I wasn't into. So was this the great "epidemic" that we'd been hearing about? Ah, but we didn't understand, people told us. It was caused by a new virus that was 100 percent lethal and about to explode out into the population at large. You could catch it from sex, toilet seats, your dentist, from breathing the air, and once you did there was no defense. "One in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years." 224 Our species could be staring at extinction.

  But I didn't buy that line either. I can't really offer a rationally packaged explanation of why. Part of it was that although AIDS had been around for some years, it was still clearly confined overwhelmingly to the original risk groups to which the term had first been applied. If it was going to "explode" out into the general population, there should have been unmistakable signs of its happening by then. There weren't. And another large part, I suppose, was that scaring the public had become such a lucrative and politically fruitful industry that the more horrific the situation was made to sound, the more skeptically I reacted. All the claims contradicted what my own eyes and ears told me. Nobody that I knew had it. Nobody that I knew knew anybody who had it. But "everybody knew" it was everywhere. Now, I don't doubt that when the Black Death hit Europe, or when smallpox reached the Americas, people knew they had an epidemic. When you need a billion-dollar propaganda industry to tell you there's a problem, you don't have a major problem.

  So I got on with life and largely forgot about the issue until I visited the University of California, Berkeley, to meet Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology, whom a mutual friend had urged me to contact. Talking to Duesberg and some of his colleagues, both then and on later occasions, left me stupefied and led to my taking a new interest in the subject. This has persisted over the years since and involved contacts with others not only across the U.S., but as far removed as England, Ireland, Germany, Russia, Australia, and South Africa. We like to think that the days of the Inquisition are over. Well, here's what can happen to politically incorrect science when it gets in the way of a bandwagon being propelled by lots of money—and to a scientist who ignores it and attempts simply to point at what the facts seem to be trying to say.

  An Industry Out of Work

  The first popular misunderstanding to clear up is that "AIDS" is not something new that appeared suddenly around 1980. It's a collection of old diseases that have been around for as long as medical history, that began showing up in clusters at greater than the average incidence. 225 An example was Pneumocystis carinnii, a rare type of pneumonia caused by a normally benign microbe that inhabits the lungs of just about every human being on the planet; it becomes pathogenic (disease-causing) typically in cancer patients whose immune systems are suppressed by chemotherapy. And, indeed, the presence of other opportunistic infections such as esophagal yeast infections confirmed immunosuppression in all of these early cases. Many of them also suffered from a hitherto rare blood-vessel tumor known as Kaposi's sarcoma. All this came as a surprise to medical authorities, since
the cases were concentrated among males aged twenty to forty, usually considered a healthy age group, and led the conditions being classified together as a syndrome presumed to have some single underlying cause. The victims were almost exclusively homosexuals, which led to a suspicion of an infectious agent, with sexual practices as the main mode of transmission. This seemed to be confirmed when other diseases associated with immune deficiency, such as TB among drug abusers, and various infections experienced by hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients, were included in the same general category too, which by this time was officially designated Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or "AIDS."

  Subsequently, the agent responsible was stated to be a newly discovered virus of the kind known as "retroviruses," later given the name Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV. The AIDS diseases were opportunistic infections that struck following infection by HIV, which was said to destroy "T-helper cells," a subset of white blood cells which respond to the presence of invading microbes and stimulate other cells into producing the appropriate antibodies against them. This incapacitated the immune system and left the victim vulnerable.

  And there you have the basic paradigm that still pretty much describes the official line today. This virus that nobody had heard of before—the technology to detect it didn't exist until the eighties—could lurk anywhere, and no vaccine existed to protect against it. Then it was found in association with various other kinds of sickness in Africa, giving rise to speculations that it might have originated there, and the media gloried in depictions of a global pandemic sweeping across continents out of control. Once smitten there was no cure, and progression to exceptionally unpleasant forms of physical devastation and eventual death was inevitable and irreversible.