Fiber Carcinogenesis: Is Asbestos the Only Hazard?

This was an editorial by an author at the National Cancer Institute's Laboratory of Pathology. It was not a full study report but mentioned preliminary data from the author's ongoing experiments. The author argued that asbestos causes cancer because of its physical form, very thin fibers that keep substantial length, rather than its chemistry. The argument rested mainly on experiments by the author's laboratory and others implanting fibers in the pleura (the lining around the lungs) of rats. The author wrote that these showed little difference between asbestos types milled to similar sizes. The author wrote that fine, long fibers of durable materials unrelated to asbestos were similarly carcinogenic when implanted in the rat pleura. In the author's estimate, durable fibers under 3 micrometers wide and (as the damaged text implies) longer than 20 micrometers were far more carcinogenic there than thicker or shorter fibers. The author concluded that any durable fiber in the long, fine size range may be carcinogenic, and judged different mechanisms in humans unlikely. The scanned text is badly damaged; its second page is illegible.

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. It was among the papers J-M kept in its medical library without an index entry.