CONFIRMED
Asbestos: The Industry That Knew It Was Killing People
Asbestos was, for most of the twentieth century, one of the most useful materials on earth — a naturally occurring mineral that could be spun into fireproof cloth, packed into insulation, mixed into cement, and woven through the fabric of modern industry, prized for its resistance to heat, fire, and wear. It was called the 'magic mineral,' and it was everywhere: in the walls and ceilings of homes and schools, in the insulation of ships and power plants, in brake linings and pipe lagging and floor tiles, handled by millions of workers and surrounding billions of people. It was also lethal. Inhaled asbestos fibers lodge in the lungs and, often decades later, cause asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma — a cancer of the lining of the lungs and abdomen that is almost exclusively caused by asbestos and is almost always fatal. None of this was a sudden discovery. The dangers of asbestos were documented in medical literature as early as the 1920s and 1930s, and the major companies of the asbestos industry came to understand, through their own workers and their own research, that the material was sickening and killing people. They did not warn. Instead, as internal documents brought to light decades later in litigation would prove, leading firms concealed the evidence, suppressed unfavorable studies, kept workers ignorant of the risks they faced, and continued to sell asbestos for as long as they profitably could. The result was one of the longest and deadliest corporate cover-ups in history, a slow-motion industrial epidemic that has killed millions and is killing people still. This is the story of the industry that knew.
