History Memes

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Ah, now you can finally smoke safely! (infosec.pub)

submitted 1 day ago by PugJesus@lemmy.world to c/historymemes@lemmy.world

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[–] Sergio@lemmy.world 60 points 1 day ago (11 children)

asbestos mines

TIL asbestos is a naturally-occurring substance (I always thought it was synthetic!)

[–] NaibofTabr 62 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Yeah, it's a crystal structure and it's really a shame that it causes so many health issues because it's kind of an amazing material otherwise. It's lightweight and strong enough to make bricks with but you can also make flexible fabric out of it, and it can hold up to really impressive amounts of heat. As the poster above said, it is still in use in some industrial applications because in some situations there is no effective alternative.

Of course the problem is that if you damage an asbestos brick or bend an asbestos fabric you get lots of tiny little asbestos fibers that come loose. My understanding is that the fibers are so small that they pierce cell walls and damage DNA strands, hence the cancer.

[–] protist@mander.xyz 78 points 1 day ago (2 children)

They're not small enough to directly damage DNA, they get trapped in your tissues and are impossible for your body to remove, and they cause inflammation and scarring. The long term inflammation and scarring is what increases cancer susceptibility

[–] NaibofTabr 11 points 11 hours ago

Here we go, found it in the Health Impacts article:

There is experimental evidence that very slim fibers (<60 nm, <0.06 μm in breadth) tangle destructively with chromosomes (being of comparable size). This is likely to cause the sort of mitosis disruption expected in cancer.

And here in MECHANISMS OF ASBESTOS-INDUCED CARCINOGENESIS

It is somewhat more difficult to understand the “chromosome tangling hypothesis.” We recently found that asbestos fibers including crocidolite are actively taken up by several different kinds of cultured cells. Furthermore, those fibers enter both the cytoplasm and the nucleus. In this situation, asbestos fibers may tangle with chromosomes when cells divide. Whether there is a specificity of tangling for any chromosomal region is the next question to be addressed.

So not quite down to the DNA level, but basically chromosomes can get wrapped around asbestos fibers during cell division.

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