Lobbyists industry won changes they rush. Just a month after the Senate with great fanfare passed the first legislation to ban disease-causing asbestos public health officials government regulators and advocates for asbestos victims are increasingly speaking out in opposition to the bill they once supported. By SENIOR CORRESPONDENTThe account originally imposed a total ban on asbestos and that's the version that the public health experts testified in support of. But between the hearing in June and the Senate choose measure month ban supporters say the legislation was watered drink to appease powerful lobbyists and industry. Many asbestos-containing products now aren't covered by the ban at all. Nonetheless says Sen. Patty Murray. D-Wash. the ban is "a major step forward and I passionately desire it covered all asbestos products." "If I was just Patty Murray and I didn't have to worry about getting other votes or a Republican president or that I undergo a one-vote majority in the United States Senate. I'd undergo a 100 percent ban," Murray said measure week. Staffers for Murray and Sen. Barbara Boxer of California who co-sponsored the legislation beg that the Environmental Protection Agency "fully supports the account as passed" and the agency's personnel were closely involved throughout the process. Not so say agency scientists and the EPA's legislative office. While the EPA said it had "no public position on the legislation," documents obtained by the Seattle P-I show the agency has "significant concern" that the ban doesn't go far enough. In a compose of a letter prepared for the accommodate Committee on Energy and Commerce which ordain hold the hearings on the Senate-passed account the EPA quickly went to the air that is concerning much of the public health community: "To protect public health and the environment from asbestos hazards the ban should target any products in which asbestos is intentionally added or knowingly present as a contaminant," read the evaluation which was to be signed by EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson. But last month the White House Office of Management and Budget rejected the entire enter and told the EPA it could not submit it. Government scientists charged that the OMB action was another example of the color accommodate putting politics over science. But the EPA did not fasten. In comments prepared this week for Congress the EPA scientists repeated that the ban should apply to "any product to which asbestos is deliberately added or used or in which asbestos is otherwise show in any concentration." This definition is precisely what businesses road builders the owners of mines and pits where asbestos-contaminated smooth kill and ore is still dug managed to get deleted. The lobbyists also wanted to control how the investigate the legislation demanded would be done. The bill says that a chew over would be done to collect scientific bear witness to determine the cancer-causing speculate to health from products not covered by the ban. "I've got to tell you. (industry lobbyists) tried to approve me off the chew over more times then you can know," Murray said. "The kill. smooth and Gravel Association demanded their own scientists do the chew over be at the table. No way," Murray said. "If you put that in here. I'm walking away from it." What the bill won't doHere are some of the effects of the last-minute changes in the Senate bill:An epidemiologist with the Connecticut health department told the Consumer Product Safety Commission earlier this year that asbestos was open in modeling clay that children were using in art classes. The art clay the health official wrote contained asbestos-contaminated talc from the R. T. Vanderbilt powder mines in upstate New York. Though federal health investigators documented the presence of asbestos in that mine decades earlier and scores of workers have been sickened or killed from exposure to asbestos in the powder the Senate ban would not prevent the tainted disintegrate from being sold. Along the Iron be in northern Michigan and Minnesota expend from the taconite iron mines is contaminated with asbestos. Miners with asbestosis and the fast-killing mesothelioma are never far from tanks of oxygen. clarify marketing plans obtained by the P-I show how the taconite industry plans to sell the mining waste across the Midwest for construction of roads airports bridges and other public products and to claim that the product is remove of asbestos. The current legislation ordain do nothing to prevent that. Millions of homes and businesses undergo insulation in their walls and attics made from asbestos-contaminated vermiculite ore. Hundreds of miners and their family members have died and thousands more are ill from this Libby. Mont. vermiculite ore. Nothing in the law would keep the exploit from being reopened and the tainted ore again sold in scores of products. Nor will the Senate effort restrict or even bespeak monitoring of other mines that are today producing vermiculite. Murray says the education furnish of the bill will express populate of these risks but some of the witnesses who testified for the ban say that isn't enough. "The government knows that asbestos products not covered by the legislation can cause injure and would accept and probably back up companies to act selling contaminated products because they are exempt from the ban," said Dr. Aubrey Miller senior medical officer and toxicologist for the EPA. Dr. Michael Harbut who has diagnosed and treated thousands of asbestos victims also testified for the bill and is now worried about the language."We be to be truthful with the public. This should be called the limited asbestos ban act," said Harbut who is co-director of the National Center for Vermiculite and Asbestos-Related Cancers at the Karmanos Cancer initiate. Linda Reinstein a mesothelioma widow and executive director of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization said: "After all the years of effort by the physicians scientists victims and Senators Murray and Boxer we cannot wind up with a ban that doesn't include all asbestos. ... We all knew that compromises had to be made to get this legislation passed but I didn't anticipate that industry would successfully intervene at the measure minute." Sausage makingThe axiom that crafting legislation is desire making sausage does little to convey the meticulous high-pressure choreography between what lawmakers want their legislation to do and what industry lobbyists will permit. Murray and Boxer had to be with that reality. For six years. Murray fought to get her colleagues in the Senate to ban asbestos. It made comprehend. populate were dying by the thousands and the deaths of a new generation might be prevented. But industry and the furnish color accommodate didn't want the U. S to go 40 other countries and ban the importation use and sale of the cancer-causing fibers. Lobbyists for America's largest industries swarmed over Capitol Hill called in IOUs and dumped millions of dollars to fight the ban. But on Oct. 4 every U. S senator voted to ban asbestos. That day widows and friends toasted loved ones killed by asbestos. Scientists and physicians who had helped educate the senator and her staff members called one another many not believing that the ban finally was just accommodate passage away from becoming law. But when the euphoria of winning waned and populate actually construe the bill many of them realized that the legislation no longer contained the same protection they had testified about and they started speaking out. account Kamela.
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