Now here's a question for any medical experts out there. From the early 20th century until about the 1990s, almost all brake shoes and brake pads on all vehicles on the road were made using asbestos. Inevitably, as the brake pad or shoe wears, whatever it is made from is released into the atmosphere as dust.
People living in large urban conurbations like say, for example, London, will have been exposed to truly vast quantities of this dust as each time a large vehicle like a London bus moved along the road on a dry day a cloud of invisible dust will have been stirred up into the atmosphere.
So, my question is this:
as asbestos is now considered to be deadly dangerous, how come the healthcare systems throughout the world are not seeing hundreds or even thousands of patients suffering from asbestosis and/or mesothelioma, given the vast amount of asbestos dust that all of us who lived in large towns and cities in that era will have inhaled?
I'm not an expert, but as a very good general rule, the danger of almost any substance comes in proportion to its concentration. "The dose makes the poison".
Your average pedestrian was surely exposed to asbestos dust, but apparently, not enough to cause them and substantial harm.
The guys fixing brakes for a living? They probably had a noticeable number of problems, but of course we might or might not have kept track.
In 1966, I was an apprentice motor mechanic. There was a guy called 'Snowy' who worked in the service bay, whose job it was to pull off the brake drums and blow out all the dust in them. He also blew any dust from the disk brake assemblies but there weren't that many Fords with disk brakes back then. Of course back then he wasn't provided with a mask or any protective gear!
He was called 'Snowy' beacause he was permanently white with the dust from the brakes of the era. I rememeber meeting him some 15 - 20 years after he had retired and he was still going strong then.
@Paulos_the_fog
Wow. Even just ordinary dust might have ruined him, being exposed like that. They made them tough, back in the day.