By Anupum Pant
Today we know that asbestos is an evil substance. One of the direct diseases it causes is lung cancer. When asbestos fibers get inside the body, they cause genetic damage in cells which grows gradually and cancerous cells start developing. But that’s not it. There’s an increasing agreement among scientists that asbestos exposure is linked with several other kinds of cancers.
Asbestos, when it’s wickedness wasn’t know, used to be a very common substance lying around here and there, is now being replaced with other benign substitutes.
It’s like those times when cigarette smoking used to be advertised on the TV as being healthy. The ads of those times also had doctors recommending a particular brand of cigarettes. Watch some of the videos here.
So, obviously, during the time when smoking and asbestos were cool, they were combined in a single product which had a cumulative coolness coefficient of both asbestos and cigarettes.
There was this brand of of Kent micronite cigarettes which used fibers of asbestos for the filter part of it. These were made by a company called Hollinsworth & Vose Company. The ads said that these filters offered “the greatest health protection” in the history. Apparently, these filters could filter 30% extra tar. About 12 Billion of these cigarettes were sold.
Slowly, the production of these filters was stopped and asbestos was replaced by something benign, in something evil that’d still cause cancer. This brand is sold even today, without the “dangerous part” of asbestos.
I always wonder what all is considered “safe” by the scientists today. It’s only a matter of time that we’ll realize how something very common, ordinary and safe we use every day in our life is a seriously life threatening thing.
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