Mailart 365 has moved

So, by day 2 I'd already fallen behind with the "one-a-day" ethos... despite the story being started on December 2nd, I managed to finish and send this card to my good friend Julia on the morning of the 3rd. I guess this is the time that people's personalities start to shine through, it becomes clear who is well-organised and who amongst us just can't say no to a few more drinks at a party (oops).

Julia is an urban planner, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to run a questioneverything365 tale about asbestos, and the story goes something like this:

We now commonly know asbestos as the building material which is made of fibres which can cause serious health problems if inhaled, or even death. I've seen estimates that reckon in the US alone over 100,000 people have died from asbestos exposure in the ship-building industry alone. People first became suspicious about it in the early 20th century when the use of asbestos in the US was pretty significant... and there was an abnormally high number of deaths occurring in asbestos-mining towns compared to other places. But it was only in the 1980s the stuff became a banned substance in the Western world. Before this, it's fair to say we loved it! And who can blame us? Asbestos is flame-retardant, heat-resistant, flexible and it insulates. In fact, Asbestos is a natural substance and there's evidence it’s been used for over 4,500 years (people even made cooking utensils out of it - eek!).
So there we have it. Perhaps it was just one of those things too good to be true. But it makes you wonder how other such stories out there which span over 4,000 years and end not so nicely... That's why we should questioneverything(365).

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