Although the manufacture and use of asbestos was prohibited in Spain more than 20 years ago, the problem related to the waste of this material throughout the national territory, and specifically in Toledo, is still valid. That is why the ‘El Tajo’ Neighborhood Association of the capital of Castile-La Mancha picked up the gauntlet and organized this year the National Congress on Asbestos, with a series of speakers, who presented the need for responses and solutions to the risks for the health caused by asbestos fibers.
Gema Ruiz Azaña, coordinator of the Toledo neighborhood association that turns 50 in 2025, recalled during the inauguration that the asbestos problem is not only in Toledo, due to the amount of accumulated waste, but that it is a national problem. But he also warned, taking advantage of the presence of the city’s mayor, Carlos Velázquez, that it is his “obligation” to demand from the Community Board a plan to solve the waste problem and he regretted that no one from the regional government wanted to attend the meeting. “You are obliged to make the request,” he asserted.
For his part, Velázquez announced that a “significant” financial amount will be incorporated into the 2025 budgets to map asbestos in the capital and assured that although it is not his responsibility, it is his “duty.” The councilor assured that “we do not want to limit ourselves to demanding that other administrations” remove the remains, but that they will fulfill “their obligation” as a local administration. “No one is going to make this map for us. It is our duty,” he stressed.
“All forms of asbestos” are carcinogenic
At the first table of the congress, Dr. Antonio Agudo, a doctor specialized in preventive medicine and public health, highlighted that “all forms of asbestos” are carcinogenic to human beings and are the “only” cause of mesothelioma, a lung cancer. It affects the pleura, the layer that covers the lungs. “It has no other cause apart from asbestos,” said Agudo.
The specialist also warned that the number of mesotheliomas that will be detected in the coming years will grow by “50%.” “It stopped being a work problem a long time ago. Now it is a public health problem, within everyone’s reach.”
Pulmonologist Carmen Diego, section head of the Central University Hospital of Asturias, recalled that a hundred years ago medical literature warned of the dangers of asbestos for workers who handled it. “Already in the 1960s, it was noted that asbestos causes pleural cancer,” highlighted the expert, who made reference to cases from the last century in the United Kingdom.
“Mesothelioma is a cancer that would not exist if there were no asbestos”
“Mesothelioma is a cancer that would not exist if there were no asbestos,” says Juan Ruiz Martín, pathologist at the Toledo University Hospital and professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), one of the experts who participated in the meeting. .
Since 2000, a total of 35 cases of mesothelioma have been detected in Toledo. “It is a cancer that has no cure. “It kills you in a period of between one and two years,” he explains about this disease that has not only directly affected workers at Ibertubo, the defunct company that deposited around 90 thousand tons of this fiber cement component in different parts of the Toledo neighborhood. of the Polygon.
“We understand that the asbestos problem has a very important scientific, health and social basis. All these legs of the problem have to be addressed equally,” explains Ruiz Martín in statements prior to the celebration of an event that has “top-level professionals” and with whom they want to “offer an approach with which the citizen is capable to understand that you have a problem at the doors of your house.”
The pathologist and university professor points out that the condition of asbestos in Ibertubo workers is “very well studied”, but “what is not known is how it affects the general population, nor the partners, relatives or neighbors of the workers. ”. “Thanks to work carried out by Dr. Josep Tarrés – who is also present on the health table of Congress – we know that there is an environmental impact and that it causes different types of cancer.”
Asbestos in the human body is also a waste
The industrial engineer and sociologist, Miguel Ángel Figueroa, recently received a doctorate from the University of La Laguna with his work ‘Culture of safety and health at work and risk of exposure to asbestos’, also participated in the technical table of the congress. “Asbestos in a person’s body is also waste,” explains the expert, who highlights that this situation is not a work accident, but rather an “occupational disease associated with waste.”
“Asbestos has a long latency period of 10, 20 or even 40 years,” says Figueroa, and it can affect workers, the people they live with and also the neighbors of the places where the waste has been installed. .
For example, it points to the waste from the Uralita factory in Cerdanyola, which was sentenced to pay 3.5 million euros to neighbors for exposure to this material. Exposure, he describes, can cause a series of diseases, from laryngeal cancer to pulmonary fibrosis.
Figueroa focuses especially on the treatment of the waste left by working with asbestos and explains situations in which the cleaning of buildings with traces of asbestos has been done “in a wild manner”, without taking the necessary precautions, as in the case of a property in Arona, in 2016, a situation that he has studied himself.
The sociologist has also applied the treatment of asbestos waste to Ulrich Beck’s theory of Risk Society, which talks “fundamentally” about the distribution of wealth that has been created thanks to industrial development. “This is an inversely proportional distribution of risks, which affects workers more,” he says.
“In Spain there is a handicap, since it is not one of the most developed countries in Europe, it arrived late in industrial development and it has also arrived late in analyzing the risks of asbestos,” he explains and recalls that it was only at the end of 2001 when Its use and manufacture was prohibited.
Due to this delay there is still “a lot of asbestos installed” and that is why it must be removed “as God commands,” he asserts. “And of course, this is the problem now, removing it,” he highlights. Figueroa recalls that there is a ruling that places the year 2032 as the limit to remove all asbestos from the continent. “It’s just around the corner.”
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