Do you live in a home or work in a building that has asbestos in it? If a home or building is on the older side, there is a good chance that it has at least some asbestos in it.
Once upon a time, asbestos was used to help make everything from insulation to flooring tiles to plumbing pipes. Asbestos is a natural-occurring mineral that was utilized to make these things stronger and fire-resistant.
But these days, you won’t find asbestos in any newer homes or commercial buildings. This is because the dangers of asbestos were discovered back in the 1980s.
Since then, builders have stopped using asbestos during construction projects. They’ve also started to perform asbestos removal while working on older homes and buildings.
If you aren’t aware of the potential risks of asbestos, you should learn about them today. It’ll show you what makes asbestos so dangerous and help you steer clear of having to deal with the side effects of asbestos at any point.
Check out the dangers of asbestos below.
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Asbestosis
If there is asbestos in a home or asbestos in a commercial building and it’s not disturbed, you won’t have to worry too much about it impacting your health. But if work is ever done on a home or commercial building and asbestos is disturbed, asbestos fibers will enter the air inside of it.
When these fibers get into the air, there is a very good chance that you will breathe at least some of them in. And when you do, the asbestos fibers will attack your lungs and cause scarring to occur in many cases.
This scarring can lead to what is called asbestosis. It’s a condition that can make it difficult for oxygen and carbon dioxide to move in and out of your scarred lungs. Eventually, it will become very challenging for you to breathe.
The good news is that you shouldn’t have to be concerned about dealing with asbestosis after breathing asbestos fibers in for just a few days, weeks, or even months. It often takes years of asbestos exposure for asbestosis to set in.
But that doesn’t mean that you should turn a blind eye to asbestos. You should still make it a point to have asbestos removal done ASAP if you know that asbestos in your home or commercial building has been disturbed. You can hire a company to do residential or commercial asbestos removal for you.
Pleural Disease
Another one of the dangers of asbestos is called pleural disease. Fortunately, it’s a non-cancerous condition that doesn’t hit everyone hard. But it’s still worth trying to avoid this disease by limiting your exposure to asbestos at all costs.
Pleural disease can cause changes to occur in the membrane that surrounds your chest cavity and your lungs. This membrane will sometimes either get very thick or very sparse in certain areas, and it can result in fluid building up all around your lungs.
When this happens, you may notice that you won’t be able to breathe as well as you normally do. You may experience decreased lung function as a whole.
Not everyone who is diagnosed with pleural disease struggles to breathe because of it. But those who do will often have to make adjustments to the ways in which they live and work to offset the disease.
Lung Cancer
When you hear about a person being diagnosed with lung cancer, you probably automatically assume that smoking had something to do with it. But it’s worth noting that lung cancer can also be caused by a whole host of other things. Asbestos is one of them.
If you spend a lot of time breathing in asbestos, it can lead to a malignant tumor growing in your lungs. This tumor will block the air passages in your lungs and leave you gasping for air in many instances.
And if you just so happen to be a smoker who is also exposed to asbestos? This can be a worst-case scenario for you. There will be an increased chance that you’ll be forced to deal with lung cancer at some point.
Mesothelioma
The average person is not going to have to spend too much time worrying about being diagnosed with mesothelioma. It’s a rare form of cancer that requires a person to be exposed to asbestos early and often over the course of many years.
But if you happen to work in an industry like the mining industry where you’re constantly exposed to asbestos, mesothelioma could become a problem for you.
Mesothelioma attacks the membrane that covers the chest cavity and lungs. It also attacks the membrane that covers the abdominal cavity as well as the membranes that cover many other organs inside of a person’s body.
And it does all of this slowly over time. It’s why those with mesothelioma don’t typically see any symptoms associated with it until 30 years after they’re exposed to asbestos for the first time.
If you suspect that you’ve been exposed to asbestos at work for decades now, it’s something you should discuss with your doctor. There is a decent chance that you could be diagnosed with mesothelioma sooner or later.
You Should Try to Avoid All of These Dangers of Asbestos
As you’ve seen here, the answer to the question, “Is asbestos dangerous?”, is almost always “yes!” You don’t want to spend any more time breathing asbestos in than you have to.
If you have any asbestos in your home, you should aim to remove it from the premises ASAP. Or if you work in a building with asbestos in it, you should complain about it until the owner of the building takes action. Otherwise, you could expose yourself to the dangers of asbestos and pay the ultimate price for it.
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