The asbestos industry is able to thrive in Russia because very little attention
is given to human rights or civil rights. Putin really basically runs the show
one might ask what is the future of asbestos production in use as long as
There's profit to be made and officials to be bribed, this will continue but if you can't
control asbestos the most notorious industrial carcinogen known what
can you control?
asbestos is a remarkable mineral actually stone, it is made up of tiny but
extremely strong and flexible fibers it was absolutely fire safe and water
couldn't harm it. We suggest you consider this material for your home.
Designed to last a lifetime, a trouble free lifetime!
Asbestos was once widely used
in homes and buildings across the US but is now known as a carcinogen and hazardous
substance because of the dangerous health risks from exposure to this toxic
mineral enormous effort is put into removing it from houses and materials
because asbestos kills more than a hundred thousand people a year and is
Banned in 59 countries. But rather than being left in the ground
countries like Russia one of the world's largest producer of asbestos mines about
a million tons of it a year and supplies more than half the world's asbestos
to find out why anyone would still work with and sell such a dangerous
substance we went to the home of the world's largest asbestos mine in a place
so proud of their industry they named the town after it Asbest, Russia
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that asbestos exposure causes cancer as we
drove through the town all we saw were signs of local prime and a monument
literally made out of a chunk of asbestos
Asebstos is often mined by using dynamite
unfortunately that means the deadly fibers are spread into the air which
made me terrified of standing close to the pit without full protective gear
when I turned up wearing what's legally required in the USA and Europe I felt like
an alien and really stood out from the locals
as it turns up the Euro Alaska Mine is the local tourist attraction and if
sightseers want to learn more
they can visit a museum in town dedicated to it
asbestos mining boomed during the Soviet era
This formerly agrarian region became one of
the hundreds of soviet mono towns who's entire economy was built around a single
mine or factory to this day the Euro asbest mine provide seventy percent of
the town's income which means that banning it would be economically devastating
We visited the home of a local man who worked as an
excavator drivers in the asbestos mine he had lived his whole life in Asbest
just a few minutes walk from the open pit because of the impact this interview
could have on his job and his family we had to conceal his identity
does everything in Asbest revolve around the asbestos industry?
Are you worried about any hazards that come with working with asbestos?
After this Euro Asbest employee surprisingly conveyed that he was not fearful to handle
asbestos we met a retired mine worker who had a more skeptical outlook on
the situation
We wanted to find out more about the health risks of
asbestos exposure we spoke to an expert on the subject the esteemed epidemiologist
Dr. Arthur Frank the term asbestos refers to six naturally occurring
minerals chrysotile being one of them it is the only serpentine form the other
five are called amphiboles they are structurally different but medically
have the same properties asbestos at one time was called the magic mineral
because it was utilized for many useful things insulation materials it didn't
conduct electricity it was used as a filtering agent over three to four
thousand products alone and the United States one time had asbestos. It was a
wonderful material unfortunately it also killed people what happens when you're
exposed is you both inhale it and you ingest it. The asbestos has the ability to
alter the nucleus of the cells so that these cells now become cancerous
get a lung cancer or the disease we call mesothelioma this cancer of the lining
of the lung that fills the lung with fluid in most cases and then over time
literally suffocates you and will ultimately kill you
in the United States this had a devastating effect on those people
exposed essentially everyone in the construction trades was exposed shipyard
workers were exposed and many others have been exposed over time the effects
of asbestos exposure in the United States is evident in mining towns like
Libby, Montana water, soil, home, school playgrounds in industrial sites in Libby
were contaminated with asbestos
as a result of a nearby vermiculite mine and processing operation owned by
WR Grace and Company normally safe and used in many products the vermiculite in the
mine was heavily contaminated with asbestos and as a result over 400 people have
died in Libby due to exposure to asbestos or from asbestos related diseases
She comes down here in her cart, leaves it right here,
gets out, goes to the bathroom
She...She can't even brush her teeth
and she has to come out here and stand here and get her breath
before she can even sit down
because it makes her worse when she sits down for a couple seconds.
It's terrible
she got a special bed, she has to have
Don Munsel never worked in the mine himself. His stepfather did and the asbestos dust in the clothes
he brought back from work was enough to give Don severe mesothelioma
I just think I've been cheated
They should have warned the people in this town about the seriousness of it
they got away with murder
I didn't think I'd ever get it cause i never worked there but I did
I gotta stand up a little bit
and all this talking even shortened my breath out real bad
Yeah, I've lived in this country all my life
I never thought this would happen to me
These five tanks
last two weeks
And now that she's up on eight I don't even think it'll last two weeks
if it takes me over 60 seconds to do this, she passes out, she literally will pass out
They knew it was bad for us and they let us expose our babies
and people that would come and visit us
"Oh, the best way to show them how this stuff works is to pop it for them"
So you get a little piece of paper, a little piece of the ore, vermiculite
and it would be no bigger than a slice of your paper
and you'd heat it up and it would *shh* go about this thick
It was amazing but it was the worst thing we could've done to them
I was a foreman and I had to go up a lot and so she'd ride up there with me, and my kids
We'd go over there, take them through the plant and show them how it run and stuff and...
I miss being spontaneous we loved to fish, so we'd go behind the screening plant
that was a good easy fishing hole after dinner the babies, I could set them down
in that asbestos sand
They'd build sandcastles and they'd play and build all kinds of things
in this asbestos while I just had fun fishing
as beautiful as this country is,
it killed us
I know it's gonna kill me
and it's probably gonna kill my kids and husband
and it didn't really kill us, it was W. R. Grace that killed us
they knew
they knew...
In June 2009, The EPA declared a public health emergency
in the town of Libby and surrounding communities the area is now designated as
a Superfund site also known as a hazardous waste site and the EPA
investigation and cleanup of the site is ongoing the asbestos in libby is a
different kind of asbestos than what's mined in russia but the scientific
community has found that all types of asbestos can cause cancer and deadly lung diseases
to find out why this toxic industry continues to thrive around the
developing world
we met with MIT professor and former chair of the National Advisory Committee
on occupational safety and health, Dr. Nicholas Ashford
the asbestos industry today I think you would have to say is you know a
criminal industry
and all the epidemiological societies,
fifteen of them, have endorsed the fact that this
should be regarded as a hazard
and when you deliberately disregard public and worker health
you're committing murder there's no other way to put it
you could argue that you don't know which particular worker you're murdering
but on the whole, the statistics are very very clear
with all the proof from
the asbestos exposure in the U.S. we wondered if physicians and officials in
Russia were aware of the risks posed to the workers of the Euro Asbest asbestos mine
and those living nearby so we drove to the Oncology Center in
nearby Yekaterinburg to meet Dr. Sergey Berezin, hoping he could tell us
about the affect the mine in Asbest was having on the citizens
What are the most common types of cancer in this area?
Do you have a lot of patients from Asbest?
Not only did Dr.Berezin not fear
the air in Asbest, he seemed quite fond of the mineral itself which completely
contradicts what oncologists in the West would have to say about asbestos
That's asbestos!
and you can just touch it like that? It's not dangerous?
That was such a strange interview
As he wouldn't let us speak to his patients at the Yekaterinburg Oncology Center
We headed to the local hospital in Asbest
to see if anyone there would speak out
our fixer is trying to talk to one of the patients now but so far it's not going so well
She doesn't want anymore
it was clear that no one was going to say anything bad about either asbestos
or more importantly the company that mines it, URALASBEST. URALASBEST owns this town
it sponsors, it's school, the health care system,
football teams everyone's livelihood is depending on them it's understandable
that people who rely on a single industry for their livelihood are not
going to bite the hand that feeds them with negative remarks so to find out
where russia really stands on the hazards of asbestos we went to Moscow to
speak to the head of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences Dr. Kovalevski has
Who's been conducting research on workers in Asbest on behalf of the World Health Organization
The people in Asbest live right next to an open asbestos pit mine,
Is this dangerous?
Life is dangerous
You have been studying the affects of asbestos exposure in Asbest since 2009,
what has your research found so far?
The problem however is not that the research will
take years but that the research itself has been called into question by a group
of acclaimed scientists like Dr. Arthur Frank, who have petitioned the World Health
Organization to end their relationship with Dr. Kovalevski over ethical
questions surrounding his ties to the Russian asbestos industry
a wealthy and powerful business that is alive and well in spite of well-documented health risks
In russia they have stopped recording mesothelioma separately as a type of
cancer and have lumped it in with other diseases so that you no longer can
identify mesotheliomas what we've learned in public health is the absence
of data doesn't mean the absence of disease
this is the same tactic that the tobacco companies used and saying we don't know
enough to say that tobacco is harmful we certainly know enough about a chrysotile
asbestos to say that it is harmful
the fact that we've learned in the west that asbestos use can cause mesotheliomas
and that we've had an epidemic that is continuing and will continue for a
number of decades yet
is nothing like what we're going to see in the developing world like India and
China the Indians import a lot of Russian asbestos and they will have the
same epidemic of mesotheliomas and other asbestos-related cancers as we've had in
the West because they have not learned the lessons that we have that asbestos is
harmful and that it should not be used