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Asbestos Disease

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Asbestos Disease
James Hardie Industries & Asbestos Disease
What is asbestos?
Asbestos is a set of six naturally occurring minerals with fibrous qualities. Asbestos has been used for thousands of years but was more frequently used during the 19th & 20th centuries due to its average tensile strength, sound absorption as well as fire resistant qualities. Due to these desirable qualities asbestos became one of the most popular building materials in Australia. During the 1960s & 70s Australia had the highest amount of asbestos per person in the world with over 30% of houses constructed containing asbestos products.
James Hardie Industries’ involvement with asbestos
James Hardie Industries (JHI) is a buildings material manufacturer in addition to the largest users of asbestos in Australia during the 1970s & 1980s. They produced a wide range of housing products including: insulation, pipes, brake linings; which all contained asbestos, as well as their most popular product fibro-cement sheeting (also known as asbestos cement). James Hardie Industries’ was just one of many companies mining asbestos in Australia; running asbestos plants in NSW, SA, VIC, QLD & WA.
Dangers of asbestos
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Because asbestos is comprised of millions of micro fibres, inhaling them can cause them to get caught in your lungs resulting in pleural abnormalities & or other related diseases such as lung cancer & mesothelioma. Even though the effects of asbestos have been reported as early as Roman times, they weren’t widley recognised till the 1970s when the effects of pleural abnormalities & other asbestos related diseases began showing in the former mine

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