Asbestosis and cancer of the lung (1948)

The text supplied appears not to be the cited article. It is an unsigned editorial titled "Asbestosis and Cancer of the Lung," and no authors are named. It presented no new research; it reviewed earlier data on lung cancer in people with asbestosis. Its main source, the 1947 Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories in England, covered 235 deaths from 1924 to 1946 that were caused by asbestosis or in which asbestosis was found at necropsy. Cancer of the lungs or pleura was found in 31 of these 235 (13.2 per cent): 22 of 128 men (17.2 per cent) and 9 of 107 women (8.4 per cent). The editorial compared this with about 1 per cent of all necropsies. It noted a male-to-female ratio of 2.4 to 1, against 5 to 1 for lung cancer in general. It also cited a mouse study by Nordmann and Sorge in which 20 per cent of surviving mice that inhaled asbestos dust developed squamous cell bronchial cancer. The editorial concluded that the evidence supported a causal relation and called lung cancer a probable occupational hazard.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

From J-M's medical library

This copy comes from the Johns-Manville medical library. J-M listed it in its medical library index as no. 005292.

We publish an editorial for research and commentary: it shows what the medical literature in a leading asbestos company's own library said on the subject, and when. Our summary above is our own reading of it. The copyright stays with the publisher.