Originally posted by IronChef:
Yeah, something's gotta give sooner or later though (preferrably sooner). Women's rights have come a long way here in the U.S. since the 50's but even today, the whole idea of "equal pay for equal work" is still a popular myth for the most part. Hopefully, Japanese society will be able to evolve to the point where women are at least no longer considered subordinates on some level to their male counterparts (in work, in marriage, etc.).
I agree with that, Iron Chef. Interesting post, Maciamo.

As far as divisions within schools with respect to sports, I think that's true here in America, for the most part. I attended church school most of my life, so I didn't encounter that problem much. The schools were small and the boys usually ended up needing "warm bodies" for their teams, so I lucked out. They all taught me how to play football, basketball, volleyball, softball, etc. It was great! Then when I attended high school, there was something called "girls' basketball!" I couldn't believe it. I had never heard of such a thing, coming from a church school background where it didn't exist. But apparently, it's very common!

What I found interesting fairly recently is the division of men's and women's equestrian sports in Japan. I was searching a fellow equestrian's web site. She lives in Japan and rides at one of the Crane Equestrian centers. Anyway, on her site, she had links to several competitions she had entered, and I noticed they were all "Ladies" competitions. It was weird. I had never heard of that. Now, that doesn't mean I know everything about equestrian show jumping, but I usually try to keep up with the Olympic games and the showing jumping aired on cable from Spruce Meadows in Canada, as well as the Aachen in Germany. And never have I seen a separate women's division. I wonder if that's unique to Japan or if there are other countries like that. Perhaps someone else knows the answer? I've just never seen it.

Sorry, I don't know enough about economics to comment on the rest! I'll leave that discussion to you and Noyhouser and others--those who are much more knowledgeable on the subject. And the only thing I know about heating and insulation is that here in America we have had to change ours due to all of the asbestos problems:

Home asbestos fears deepen
Zonolite insulation, made in the capital and the East Bay, may be in more than 10 million houses.
By Greg Gordon -- Bee Washington Bureau
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Tuesday, January 21, 2003
WASHINGTON -- An insulation product made from asbestos-tainted Montana ore was poured into attics and walls of perhaps more than 10 million homes -- far more than the 940,000 homes originally estimated, federal officials say.

Because Zonolite attic insulation was produced at plants in Sacramento (1956-64) and the East Bay town of Newark (1964-94), sizable numbers of affected homes are believed to be in Northern and Central California.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was preparing to issue a nationwide alert about the problem last year but reconsidered after protests from the company that sold Zonolite and the White House's Office of Management and Budget.

Zonolite, which was made from vermiculite ore, has an asbestos content of less than 1 percent. But EPA officials say that merely jostling the fluffy, easy-to-crumble granules can release microscopic asbestos fibers into the air at dangerous concentrations.

If inhaled at these levels for as little as a few weeks, Zonolite's particularly toxic strain of tremolite asbestos can cause disabling or lethal lung diseases that don't show up for 10 to 40 years, they said.

Regional EPA officials, giving credence to a Dec. 29 report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, said Administrator Christie Whitman grew so concerned about the Zonolite problem last winter that she directed aides to come up with strategies for alerting homeowners nationwide.

The EPA officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Whitman also was on the verge of declaring an unprecedented "Public Health Emergency" authorizing removal of Zonolite from homes in the asbestos-devastated town of Libby, Mont. Libby is near the mountain where miners extracted the vermiculite, which was later found to be a carcinogen, from the early 1920s until 1990.

Agency planning had gone so far that press releases were drafted announcing both actions, these officials said, when Whitman abruptly dropped them both. They said that internal e-mails and other evidence show the White House's Office of Management and Budget interceded in April, pressuring EPA to abandon the initiatives.

Now-bankrupt W.R. Grace & Co., which operated the mine from 1963 to 1989 and marketed Zonolite nationally, sent Whitman a letter last April opposing the warning and the emergency declaration.

In a letter to Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., on Thursday, Whitman said EPA, not OMB, made both decisions, and that OMB was only one of many agencies that had input. She said she put off a decision on a nationwide health warning about Zonolite until she learns more about its risks from an ongoing agency study. Murray proposed legislation last year that would require EPA to launch a national campaign to educate the public about Zonolite.

Whitman also wrote that she chose not to declare an emergency for Libby, where asbestos has killed or sickened hundreds of miners and residents, because of a concern that "possible legal challenges to this untested approach" could delay cleanup efforts.

Because sales records are scattered or have been destroyed, experts say it is impossible to determine precisely how many U.S. homes contain Zonolite. EPA officials now say that a 1985 agency assessment estimating it was present in about 940,000 homes was not reliable.

Darrell Scott, a Spokane, Wash., lawyer handling class action suits in which thousands of homeowners are seeking damages from Grace, estimated that Zonolite sold after 1950 is in 3 million to 10 million homes. A memo from the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry estimated that the insulation is in 12 million to 35 million homes, offices and schools.

The estimates come from Grace shipping records, which show that at least 15.6 billion pounds of vermiculite ore was shipped from Libby to hundreds of plants and factories in North America. Those included the Sacramento plant, which was on Jibboom Street, off Richards Boulevard. Partial Grace sales records and trial testimony have also contributed to the estimates.

In a nine-page, April 10 letter to the EPA chief, William Corcoran, Grace's vice president of public and regulatory affairs, said the Montana ore contained only small amounts of asbestos, nearly all of which was removed during the manufacture of Zonolite.

"There is no credible reason to believe" that Zonolite "has ever caused an asbestos-related disease in anyone who has used it in his/her home," he wrote.

Public records and asbestos experts say otherwise.

In 1993, a Missouri appeals court upheld a $2.5 million jury award to Edward Harashe, a 67-year-old retired St. Louis plumber who died that year of mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lungs caused by asbestos. The court traced Harashe's death to his decisions to insulate his home in the 1950s with 20 bags of Zonolite and to add more during a 1975 renovation.

Paul Peronard, formerly the EPA's on-scene coordinator of an $85 million federal asbestos cleanup in and around Libby, said the agency's air sampling in the attics of Libby homeowners who used Zonolite insulation "have shown very clearly that if you disturb the material, you get very, very high levels of asbestos.

"Quite a few people have reported contracting asbestos-related diseases just from handling the insulation," Peronard said.

EPA has removed the insulation from the attics of about 30 Libby area homes at a cost of about $10,000 each.

When Grace last year played down the risks of Zonolite in the bankruptcy court, EPA lawyers filed briefs challenging the firm's "incorrect and misleading" statements.

EPA officials said their sampling in homes where the Zonolite lay undisturbed found asbestos levels 10 to 100 times higher than those Grace reported and, when they stirred up vermiculite dust, they measured "exposure levels at 10,000 to 100,000 times higher" than Grace's readings.

Keven McDermott, who investigated vermiculite exposures for EPA's Seattle regional office, said in a phone interview that she gets calls each week from homeowners who just discovered Zonolite in their attics.

"If there's a common theme," she said, "it's that, 'I wish I'd known sooner. I'm afraid that I've needlessly exposed my family, and particularly my children, to asbestos.'"

Among those at greatest risk for exposure to Zonolite are workers who enter attics to install television cables, phone lines and plumbing vents or to perform renovations.
About the Writer
---------------------------

The Bee's Greg Gordon can be reached at (202) 383-0005 or [email protected] .
For more information
* Contact EPA's Toxic Substances Control Act hotline at (202) 554-1404 or visit the EPA Asbestos Web site: www.epa. gov/asbestos

* See the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at: target="_blank" class="nStoryL">www.atsdr. cdc.gov

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