Ambient air measurements do not determine safety

The Environmental Protection Agency has just now introduced the relatively new term “Libby Amphibole Asbestos” (LAA) into the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) with a numerical toxicity value of .00009, separating LAA risk from all other asbestos risks.

The common use of this numerical value is to say that this is the dose a person can be subjected to daily, continuously over their life span with a low probability of contracting disease or lung scarring as in this case. This dose requires much clarification for the people of Libby and others similarly situated throughout the United States.

Ostensibly, and as it is currently misrepresented, and in dubious layman terms, this is the cumulative dose daily that can remain in your air continuously day in and day out, with a low probability of lifetime negative health effects. This becomes problematic in the light that all epidemic areas of the world similarly situated to Libby, with fibers similar to LAA (meaning heavy in weight or mass fibers such as erionite and tremolite), have ambient air measurements that are essentially zero, meaning that the people who contract disease in these places have always had clean air.

In EPA measurement terms, that means that the very large numbers of death and disease that occur in these epidemic areas, occur from no exposure at all! Based upon calm ambient air measuring, Libby has always been relatively clean (I am aware of the near dust storms which are a different matter), with only the errant positive measurement caused by some extremely localized event such as a wind gust or a ground thermal, a passing car or animal or someone passing by during testing, while dusting off their coat or trousers. Or the errant short fiber that somehow just can’t find its way back to the ground as fast as its trillions of cousins can.

The 100,000 times cleaner phrase that EPA is currently using, is completely and utterly irrelevant, even if they had managed to capture good testing results back during the mining operation, to come up with this number, which they did not.

What is relevant, is the amount of LAA that a person might come into contact with. Dust that is laying on the ground, settled in their homes, window sills, sidewalks, decks, impacted LAA muds in the wheels or floor mats or inside their air conditioning units of their cars and trucks. Also of course, any gardening, farming, tree or hedge trimming, leaf blowing and a million other activities that brings settled dust or LAA containing dirt or dust, from near or afar, into a person’s immediate breathing space. These are called roughly “excursion” exposures, and are the largest doses or exposures known to science.

It is not unreasonable at all or uncommon that a person contracts a 10- or 20-year exposure of .00009 in just a few minutes of close intimate excursion exposure.

This is precisely the way environmentally contracted tremolite fiber disease occurs in Metsovo, Greece, and is precisely the way environmental disease occurs everywhere tremolite and its analogs, exposures occur. The ambient air is the very least of anyone’s worries when it comes to LAA.

I wish EPA and especially the people of Libby the very best fortune in these continuing clean-up efforts. I suspect that when all is said and done and after EPA leaves Libby that it will be little problem to find the same (excursion) settled dust exposure levels that have always existed in Libby, inside homes, cars, grocery stores, office spaces and schools.

As has occurred in El Dorado County California, the people might take to cleaning their homes, cars and schools, etc. to temporarily and thoroughly mask the presence of these exposure vectors, as best they can, thereby temporarily saving the value of their property or embarrassment that accompanies a school that is thoroughly contaminated.

Then again, EPA may read this and pay close attention in their clean-up efforts or overall paradigm philosophy, sparing the people of Libby from having to follow in the footsteps of the people of El Dorado County.