Asbestos is a harmful mineral that can damage the lungs due to repeated exposure over a long period of time. The mineral used to be used for many different things such as manufacturing and building, including houses, warehouses, schools, and any kind of building that people dwell in. Due to the nature of asbestos and its fibrous makeup,  asbestos can very easily go airborne when disturbed or damaged. The fibers are extremely thin, according to sources it can be over a hundred times thinner than a human strand of hair. When asbestos does go airborne, it travels deep into the tissues of the lung and it starts to damage the cells of the lung tissue and causes them to develop into cancer cells. Asbestos traveling into the lungs can result in a few different types of cancer including  mesothelioma and asbestos-related lung cancer. Not only can asbestos cause different types of cancers, it can also cause different types of diseases as well. These diseases include asbestosis and pleural thickening. Asbestos is such a dangerous mineral it was quickly regulated once all of the repercussions of using the mineral were found through multiple studies and cases of lung cancer and mesothelioma later in life with people who worked in careers that involved asbestos exposure. However, the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t go around knocking down all the buildings that had already been built using asbestos. It’s up to asbestos removal teams to be able to keep those buildings safe for any of the people inhabiting them.

    This is what’s going to have to happen after three residence Halls at Quinnipiac University were found to have asbestos in them that were being exposed to the  students. Having students be exposed to asbestos is extremely dangerous as asbestos, as we previously established, can easily be inhaled when disturbed or damaged, just like the asbestos in  these University residence halls were. Other halls were also discovered to have asbestos in them, but these Halls will be left alone as there is no risk to having asbestos in a building as long as it isn’t disturbed or damaged. However, if any of these asbestos-containing building materials are disturbed or damaged the university will have to hire a company to perform an asbestos abatement on the dangerous contaminated halls.