The National Institutes of Health and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have banned the use of asbestos as a brake pad in workplaces, according to a statement released on Tuesday.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology also said that asbestos brake pad manufacturers should “ensure that the products they produce are safe to use in the workplace.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration also have been taking a hard line against asbestos as well, citing it as a cause of chronic disease and mortality.
Asbestos was banned in the United States by the EPA in 1994.
The government has since spent more than $3.3 billion on research and testing to try to find out how asbestos affects human health.
It has also found asbestos in more than 300,000 buildings in the U.S. Since the ban, more than 100,000 people in the country have been diagnosed with cancer or other health conditions related to asbestos.
It’s estimated that about 50 million people in America are affected by asbestos-related diseases.
A study by researchers at Harvard Medical School estimated that there were more than 11,000 deaths linked to asbestos-induced cancers and more than 5,500 deaths from asbestos-associated respiratory disease in the past 15 years.
The Centers to Prevent and Control of Asbestos Exposure, a group of asbestos workers, published an analysis in April showing that asbestos-exposed workers are more likely to develop lung cancer and heart disease than non-asbestos-exposive workers.
The authors said that the “trending mortality rate of asbestos-intolerant workers is about five times higher than the general population.”
The authors of the new study said that they were not aware of any other studies that looked at the health effects of asbestos exposure and that there was no consensus on whether asbestos is harmful or not.
They said that because of the large number of studies on asbestos, it’s important for employers to be aware of the risk of asbestos, as well as what they can do to reduce exposure.
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