The Environmentalist's Challenge (1978)

This item is a short editorial, not a research study, and it does not mention asbestos. The author, a member of the journal's Editorial Board, wrote about the hazards of substitution in environmental protection. The example was the phasing out of tetraethyl lead in gasoline. The editorial pointed to an article in the same journal issue by Joselow and colleagues, which reported that organic manganese was one of the replacements for organic lead. Those findings belong to that other article, not to this editorial. The author wrote that the health effects of manganese were relatively poorly understood and that no data were available on low-level, long-term exposure, especially in the general population. The author argued that reducing environmental lead could be done either technically, by substituting organic manganese, or socially and politically, by replacing cars with mass transportation, and that each choice carries its own consequences. The author concluded that there are no scientific answers to political questions, and that scientists can help by providing background material for unpopular social or political decisions.

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.

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.