There so many harmful chemicals in our surroundings that are causing several diseases. One of them is asbestos. This chemical is extremely harmful and that is why there are organizations working to keep the asbestos-free environment to keep the health of the people safe and sound. With asbestos the biggest problem is even a small amount of inhaled asbestos in any form can cause deadly diseases. These diseases are not easy to cure. In old days when any industry had knowledge about the dangers of exposure to asbestos, they use to hide from the workers so that they don’t face any kind of difficulties in their work. This shows how deadly exposure to asbestosis.
Asbestos is in the list of those chemicals that can cause cancer like tobacco. Since the asbestos clearance gets in the body through nose it mostly causes lung cancer if we talk about cancer. Then it also causes mesothelioma. This is a cancer of mesothelioma cells. The major problem this type of cancer is that mostly when it is diagnosed, it is already in advanced stage making it harder to cure and in most cases people are able to survive. The symptoms of this cancer are
- Weakness in muscles
- Night sweats
- Fever
- Chest pain
- Abdomen pain
- Complications in respiration
- Dry coughs
- Sneezing
- Fatigue
- Breath shortness
- Pleural effusion
Another disease caused by asbestos is asbestosis. This is not a type of cancer but it is fatal indeed. This is also related to the lungs but patients can live with this disease for longer as compare to mesothelioma. Patients with mesothelioma have the time of 4 months to 12 months. People suffering from asbestosis can live up to a decade but the symptoms are not visible in early stage. The symptoms of asbestosis are:
- Tightness in the chest
- Breath shortness
- Continuous dry cough
- Loss of appetite
- Enlarges fingertips
- Deformities in nails
Asbestos is extremely contagious for those people who are smokers. Already this is something that is causing cancerous disease in non- smokers. So, one can understand how damaging it can be for a smoker. As smoking is already damaging the lungs on the other hand that smoker gets exposure with asbestos. What happens is that that smoker has an extremely high risk of having severe lung disease.
This the reason why there are certain rules when workers are working in a place full of asbestos and you cannot work with asbestos until you are licensed, asbestos assessor. Then there are organizations who are working to keep the environment asbestos-free. For this they do the asbestos sampling and give hazardous chemical awareness training.
