A textile weaver often works in a textile mill. Until the mid-1970s there were a lot of mills around the United States that produced textiles made partially or entirely from asbestos. Asbestos is the only natural mineral that is composed of fibers that can be woven into cloth. Although there are several different types of asbestos, most textiles made from asbestos use the longest fibers from the chrysotile form of asbestos.
Some of the mills that produced asbestos-containing cloth were closed in the 1970s because they were too contaminated to keep open, but others tried to retrofit and remodel to remove the asbestos contamination. One mill in South Carolina was abandoned in the late 1970s, but it wasn’t until 2004 that the building was demolished and the site cleaned up.
A study done in England showed that people who worked in the asbestos textile mills had 300 times more asbestos in their lungs than the general population. Asbestos is a carcinogen, and medical experts agree that any exposure to a carcinogen increases the likelihood the exposed person will ultimately develop a form cancer, in this instance one of several common asbestos cancers such as lung cancer, mesothelioma, or a gastrointestional cancer. One asbestos mill in England had one out of twelve of its employees develop some sort of asbestos disease. Other studies have shown that about two percent of all textile workers who work with asbestos develop mesothelioma.
Asbestos was used so extensively because it is lightweight, chemically inert, entirely resistant to fire, and effectively insulates against both electricity and heat. These properties have made it popular for centuries. There are records of the Greeks using asbestos cloth for clothing, napkins, and tablecloths that could be cleaned by throwing them in the fire.
The danger from asbestos comes any time the fibers are disturbed. Obviously the work done in textile mills created a lot of disturbance to the fibers that then sloughed off asbestos dust that weavers could inhale. The numbers above show the results.
Asbestos causes a number of different illnesses, but the most serious among them is malignant mesothelioma. Mesothelioma, in its most common form, pleural mesothelioma, is a rare cancer of the membrane that surrounds the lungs and lines the chest and abdominal cavity.