What if I Touch, Eat, or Drink Asbestos Fibers. Or, Might you have Asbestos in your Beer?

We all know about inhaling asbestos fibers, so what about touching, eating, or drinking the fibers which otherwise are naturally in the air all around us. This has not been as extensively studied as has inhalation, but there is enough to piece together some pretty solid answers.

Below is a Blog by Attorney John Browne of Slater & Gordon in the U.K. which provides a very nice discussion on the potential health hazards with digesting asbestos fibers. Fortunately, such health risks are insignificant as compared to the breathing of the fibers. I appreciate John’s permission to repeat his analysis in full and his ability to tie in beer to an otherwise pretty tame topic.

Before we get to John’s handiwork, I want to point out that the Toxicological Profile for Asbestos by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has a pretty in depth discussion on all the risks associated with asbestos. At over 400 pages with a fairly dated but detailed analysis (the last one I could find is dated September 2001 and taken right off the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry website) it is a difficult read, but in summary:

1. Touching. Dermal exposure can cause wart like lesions developing into corns. No quantitative dose-response data was available, but in a group of workers installing amosite asbestos in ships, nearly 60% had one or more of those lesions which can be painful.
2. Oral Exposure. The principal way that people are exposed orally to asbestos is through drinking water. Studies indicate that the ingestion of asbestos fibers generally does not increase the risk of noncarcinogenic injury, but there is some evidence that it may induce precursor lesions of colon cancer. Further, chronic oral exposure may lead to an increased risk of gastrointestinal tumors.

For more on the above or the risks in general, I recommend that you download the information from the Internet side in PDF format and start reading at page 57. Let me know if you need help in that regard.

Now, to John’s analysis in the U.K. which was titled “Asbestos in Food“.

“That is a very dramatic and potentially worrying title for an article so I think it is best to start by stating that asbestos is not deliberately incorporated in food. That is certainly true here in the UK and is true worldwide. Asbestos can potentially contaminate food and water but the levels are extremely low as are the associated risks. That being said, some of the rice producing industry in India do still use talc laced with asbestos fibres to polish rice so as to make it more attractive to any potential customer and consumer. This goes to show the lack of understanding and ignorance of the toxicity of asbestos. It is not only the workers using it to carry out that operation who are at risk but also those who eat the rice. Asbestos is, as we know, a potentially lethal hazard as a food contaminant. Asbestos has, historically, been used in the production of food even here in the UK and at times when the harmfulness was well known and well documented. Though asbestos has been banned in the UK and it is no longer used in the production of foodstuffs it has undoubtedly taken a terrible toll and its use has left a chilling legacy which may linger with us for the next half a century. The history of beer and wine making dates back thousands of years. The oldest documented recipe in the world is an Egyptian recipe for beer. To produce beer and wine of high quality they should be filtered for impurities.

The filtering of beer started in the late 1800’s. Initially the filtering was carried out using paper leaves but these became sodden and easily damaged so the brewers changed to a filters known as pulp cakes. These were made of cotton and asbestos fibres and as they were cheap and very effective as a filtering material they became the industry standard. The asbestos fibres in the filter were released into the filtered beer where they would remain and be consumed when the beer was drunk. It was only relatively recently, with the growing awareness of the dangers of asbestos, that these harmful filters were replaced with alternatives which contained no asbestos. I should clarify and say that in some countries, particularly those where asbestos was completely banned the harmful filters were replaced but in other countries they are still used to this day. In Britain and in America the use of asbestos filters continued until 1980. Asbestos filters were used by some unscrupulous landlords in pubs up until the 1980s to filter the slops so that beer which was left unconsumed could be filtered and re-sold.When making wine, filtration takes place twice. Once again it was customary practice to use asbestos to filter the wine. It was not until the mid-1970s that the industry stopped using asbestos filters as standard.Asbestos filters were also used in the production of and in particular the filtration of juice, sugar and medicines. This is not an exhaustive list.It is now the considered medical opinion that the ingestion of asbestos in filtered beer is a significant factor explaining the trends in incidence of oesophageal adenocarcinoma and mesothelioma rising so rapidly over the past 50 years. Slater & Gordon has never been instructed in a claim where ingestion of asbestos in food or drink is the sole exposure to asbestos and I am afraid that any such claim would undoubtedly be a very difficult one to pursue and to establish because the negligent or guilty party would be so problematic to identify. Slater & Gordon has been instructed in many claims where maintenance men and other personnel have always taken their lunch in a boiler room which had asbestos fibres in the air. Those fibres would have accumulated on their lunches and were thus ingested. We have had successful claims against food manufacturers and producers such as Tate & Lyle, Britvic and Kraft Heinz. These claims were not relating to asbestos in the food or drinks produced but rather they arose because whenever a significant heat process is used it was common practice to have that process fed by a multitude of steam pipes and heating pipes. Historically, these pipes were always lagged with asbestos insulation which would wear or be damaged and thus liberate the deadly mineral asbestos fibres into the atmosphere to be inhaled and ingested. I once took a statement from a witness on a claim who used to nip small pieces of insulation from pipework, sniff it, pop it in his mouth and chew it to see if it was asbestos. He claimed that not only could he tell if the insulation was asbestos but could also detect, by taste, if it was white, blue or brown.

The risks to health from ingestion of asbestos fibres in food and drinking water have been studied by both epidemiology and by experiments in laboratory animals. Most epidemiological studies found no association or only very weak associations with gastrointestinal cancers. Our watchwords must be vigilance and awareness. It is an essential part of the work of AASC along with its supporters and their associates on the Asbestos Victims Support Group Forum to raise awareness of the risks associated with asbestos. It is only by ensuring that the risks are at the forefront of consciousness for Government, the Health & Safety executive and inspectorate bodies that the toll of suffering caused by asbestos can be curbed and stopped.”