By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
An environmental civic group has urged the government to study the relationship between asbestos and regular metro use. The request came Thursday after a government report showed workers at metro stations were being exposed to substances associated with causing lung disease in their construction work.
``There are about four million people using this public transportation and there are high chances that the asbestos has affected commuters' health, too,'' a spokesman of the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement said, calling on the metro company to take responsibility for the health of their workers as well as their customers.
According to the Ministry of Labor, 30 percent of 2,900 Seoul Metro workers at stations on line one through four had lung disease. The ministry said the rate is more than three times that of ordinary people. Doctors assume the main cause to be asbestos related.
The report also said asbestos particles fell from the ceiling due to poor management and are airborn and likely to inhaled by members of the public.
In early 2007, Seoul Metro conducted inspections on 30 subway stations to find 17 having asbestos on the ceilings and platforms.
The material is said to absorb noise, and stations used it on facilities to lessen the noise and vibrations caused by trains.
The metro company said that a particle of asbestos, as small as 0.02 micrometers, can lodge in human lung tissue and cause deadly disease including cancer or malignant mesothelioma. Also, drinking fluids containing particles of the material is 20 times more dangerous than being exposed to radioactivity, the research said.
In the United States and European countries, asbestos is banned from use and in Korea the use will be banned from industrial sites from 2009.