The evidence against asbestos is conclusive

(Transcript) To pretend that the question is unresolved is ridiculous. I mean it is without foundation. It's just like claiming that it's not true that snow melts under the sun. There is absolutely no more research which is necessary for you to take a very informed decision to ban the use and importation of asbestos into any country. There is as much of a medical consensus on asbestos as there is on any toxic substance. Probably the seminal paper on prevention was a paper again out of the UK in 1930 by Dr Merriweather, a physician, and Mr Price an industrial hygienist, who made the following points: they said that asbestos causes disease among men; it causes disease in women; it causes disease from various products; workers should be educated about the hazards of asbestos; prevention should take place at the workplace with proper ventilation; and if you couldn't do proper ventilation you needed to put workers into respirators. And this goes back to 1930. That understanding has not changed in more than 80 years. Even before that the insurance companies were avoiding asbestos workers as bad risks. It was documented in a study, in a report published in 1918 by an insurance actuary, that it was generally the practice of American and Canadian life insurance companies to avoid asbestos workers because they were bad risks. And the evidence has been accumulating even epidemiologically with the work of Richard Doll in 1955 on lung cancer... ... showing that the lung cancer rate among people who worked in an asbestos factory was more than10 x the expected rate... With the work of Dr Wagner in South Africa and the asbestos mines there in 1960; and then all of the work that Dr Selikoff did with over 17,800 asbestos insulators, where he showed that the lung cancer rate was 4 x that of the general population, mesotheliomas instead of causing deaths in 1 in a million people was causing death in about one in ten, and over all asbestos-related diseases were causing 50% of the deaths among members of that union. The rate of lung cancer in people who work with asbestos is way, way, way above the rate of lung cancer of similar people in the general population, that is men of a certain age, let's say. And then there are experimental animal studies that have confirmed that where you have controlled conditions and there are no confounding variables, no other exposures, where you've got animals breathing asbestos and animals not breathing asbestos and they're fed the same water, they come from the same strains of rats or mice, they're eating the same food -- and yet the one's that are exposed to the asbestos get a lot of lung cancer and of course these are non-smoking rats.