Last week's disclosure that tests for the presence of asbestos were faked in one-third of New York City's public schools only serves to underscore the real fakery on this issue: the Environmental Protection Agency's coverup of its own facts. These facts were addressed in a model asbestos law just passed by the Michigan state legislature. New York officials would be wise to take a look at it before running up the taxpayers' tab for asbestos removal. But first some background.

More than three years ago, then EPA Administrator William K. Reilly publicly stated that "the mere presence of asbestos poses no risk to human health." What he meant was spelled out in detail in a government publication. "Managing Asbestos in Buildings," that is a must-read for all responsible building officials in the country

Here is Fact One: "Although asbestos is hazardous, the risk of asbestos-related disease depends upon exposure to airborne asbestos fibers. In other words, an individual must breathe asbestos fibers in order to incur any chance of developing an asbestos-related disease. How many fibers a person must breathe to develop disease is uncertain. How- ever, at very low, exposure levels, the risk may be negligible to zero."

And in fact, the levels of asbestos fibers in the air of buildings, including the public and private schools for which the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act (AHERA) requires inspections are not just low but "negligible to zero." Whether buildings contain friable, or loose, asbestos--the focus of the inspections now being redone--is irrelevant scientifically and as a health matter. Only high levels of airborne fibers that people can breathe are considered dangerous.

Dr. Morton Corn of Johns Hopkins University, former assistant secretary of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, assembled data from hundreds of samples in buildings with "water and abusive damage to the asbestos containing surfaces." Such material can release fibers, he concluded, and the buildings could be considered dangerous. Asbestos removal bringing levels down to 0.01 fibers per cubic centimeter of air (fcc), the clearance point set by the EPA might be warranted.

More likely, however, is that even if the nine teams of industrial hygienists "deployed" in New York's 1,069 schools find loose asbestos, the discovery will be meaningless. In all probability the fiber concentration in the air will only be about 0.00064 fcc--the median of the 54 samples surveyed by Dr. Corn. That's just 0.00010 fcc more than was found in 31 samples taken in U.S. schoolrooms without asbestos.

By contrast, the median fiber concentration in the outdoor air in 48 U.S. cities was more than 10 times higher, or 0.0006 fcc, which is not surprising asbestos is used commercially in automobile brake linings, where it is subject to more abusive treatment than even the New York City public schools.

In another series of tests, asbestos fiber concentrations in buildings in poor repair were actually 28 times lower than in buildings in good repair, possibly because in poorly repaired building it is less often disturbed. Still, as Michael Cough of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment observed, "that's just the opposite of what inspections might have logically predicted."

But fear, ignorance and politics--not logic--dictates the EPA's assumption that there can be no safe level of exposure to carcinogens. Distinctions are lost in the search for zero. The clearance level after removal, 0.01 fcc, is still thousands of times higher than the original background level before and after removal. And as Dr. Malcolm Ross of the U.S. Geological Survey has pointed out, "You have to seal a building up for six months or more after a removal project, and run the ventilating system full blast, to get the asbestos levels down to what they were originally."

At bottom, the only meaningful measure we have of whether asbestos fibers in indoor air presents a threat to human health is the 0.01 fiber level. And that's what the state of Michigan determined recently in passing a law that forbids asbestos removal unless air level concentrations are above the 0.01 fcc clearance level. The law is expected to save Michigan public and private schools $1 billion.

The Michigan legislature, which passed the law 30-6 in the Senate and 90-2 in the House, simply accepted what scientists, the law, and even the New York Times recognized in a March series of articles: "Much of America's environmental program has gone seriously awry." AHERA, like many such government policies, is a "law written in reaction to popular concerns ... based on little, if any, sound research about the true nature of the threat."

To be more precise, AHERA was the result of studies of the real occupational but overblown and discredited environmental dangers of asbestos, conducted by the late Irving J. Selikoff of New York's Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, which were publicized in articles by Paul Brodeur of the New Yorker and amplified by Ralph Nader and hordes of toxic tort lawyers. Mr. Selikoff predicted that 58,000 to 73,000 people would die each year from asbestos-related disease, a figure no one--outside of New York, apparently--believes anymore not even the EPA, which has failed court to make a case foremen 13-15 deaths a year. Yet $3.2 billion was spent in 1992 for often unnecessary asbestos removals, part of some $22 billion spent since 1986.

Marvin Schneiderman, EPA's scientific expert, admitted Mr. Selikoff's figures were grossly exaggerated. In the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (April 15, 1992), he said."We made the inappropriate estimate that short-term exposures were just as nasty, as carcinogenic and deadly, as long-term exposures. . . Selikoff had worked on this a great deal, and because we had no good estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we did what scientists so often do, which was to use Selikoff's estimates without questioning them."

Well, maybe government scientists do that. Independent scientists, such as Sir Richard Doll of Oxford University the epidemiologist who established the link between lung cancer and smoking, had a different view. In his book, "The Causes of Cancer," he wrote, Mr. Selikoff's figures "were so grossly in error that no arguments based even loosely on them should be taken seriously."

Getting rid of asbestos was the central strategy of President Richard Nixon's "War on Cancer." It is somehow appropriate then that State Sen. John Schwartz of Battle Creek is the author of Michigan's new law on asbestos removal. Mr. Schwartz is a medical doctor who served with the Central Intelligence Agency in Vietnam. He remembers a thing or two about government "body counts" something reporters in the nation's capital appear to have forgotten.

Michael J. Bennett, author "The Asbestos Racket: An Environmental Parable," is affiliated with The Science and Environmental Policy Project.