Kudos to recent letter writers

To the Editor:

Kudos to Mr. D.C. Orr for his fine letter of Feb. 25. And kudos to Mr. Red Morton. These are stunning and surprising accomplishments given the fact that the entire US Government, all of the trial lawyers and some of their own neighbors are attempting to tell the people that the sky ain't blue. I guess it is indeed correct that truth has a very funny and interesting way of eventually seeing daylight.

Mr. Orr astutely mentions something I had missed. He indicates that Jim Christiansen recently said in a CAG meeting that every report about any facet of tremolite asbestos can be countered by another report, reducing the arguments to a mere matter of "opinion." Mr. Christiansen inadvertently demonstrates to us all why it is that used car salesmen do not perform open heart surgery, and why it is terribly important for the people of Libby and elsewhere in our country to hear from the very best scientists our country has to offer on this subject.

What Mr. Christiansen says is of course false. We do not send rockets into space nor probe the mysteries of the sun and planets based solely on opinions or even emotion. We do these things by the use of discovery, data and mathematics. Most discovery in the case of tremolite was made many years ago, data has been collected for a very long time and here is a small bit of current mathematics for you: There are many Libby Montana's in our world, that is to say environmental exposure scenarios where lots of people die. From Metsovo Greece, Cyprus, Anatolia Turkey to New Caledonia, to my favorite government induced death rate - El Dorado County, Calif. - not a single one of these places involves Chrysotile (as causative), the most abundant asbestos on our planet. All of these places have death and disease rates caused by "relatively" minor (in comparison to chrysotile) exposures to tremolite. On the other hand, San Francisco and its neighboring cities are built on top of chrysotile (similar to building these cities on top of the mine site at Libby), in addition the water of San Francisco has the highest levels of chrysotile measured on our planet as does the air and dust. Death rate? Why none of course. So here is the math: tremolite 770 v chrysotile zero, zip, nada. With so many huge exposure scenarios to chrysotile one would expect every other city in our U.S. to have even higher death and disease rates than Libby. They don't. So don't let them ever tell you "everybody is exposed to asbestos - it is a problem everywhere and it all boils down to opinion." The problem is with amphibole types of fibers specifically tremolite, and that is a problem our U.S. public health agencies can handle, if they ever screw their heads on right.

Terry Trent

Auburn, Calif.