"Removing asbestos makes no sense"

In this article, the chief epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society said that money (cost of about $3 billion a year) spent on asbestos removal "makes no sense from a public health standpoint..." because the risks were overestimated, so there are far better ways to spend money such as drug prevention, guardails, sunscreen or medical research. They said that the U.S. situation is very different from that in the developing world, where millions of people in mining and manufacturing are exposed to enough asbestos fibers and dust to cause incurable cancer and other diseases. In this argument, I partly agree that the money could be better
spent on other urgent issues. However, at certain point of this article it is said that people should not panic due to the fact that asbestos exposure is no worse than smoking a couple of cigarettes. My personal opinion is that people deserve to be protected from asbestos danger as much as possible. Smoking is another thing. People can choose to or not to smoke but innocent workers should not be surrounded an unsafe working environment risky for not only their own health but sometimes also for their family through their clothes from work. We are not saying here that asbestos removal should continue on a large scale. But asbestos control should be practiced and in case of necessity, removal action should be taken regardless of the expense rather than an exchange for life. Therefore, it is worthwhile to develop asbestos detection systems, which will not benefit only individuals but the society as a whole. More importantly, the system will help alleviate the burden of the companies that ensure safe working environment, so they can improve their performance with high reliability and productivity. However, to have such a high quality system as expected is a big challenge for our thesis. We hope that it will be useful for controlling asbestos as well as future analysis of other critical types of particles if we succeed in implementing this system with high detection accuracy. If not, classical method with manual labor should be imployed.