Effects of Dusts and Fumes upon Man (1954)

This textbook chapter, not an original study, described how dusts and fumes affect people, drawing on other researchers' work. The authors named four types of dust-related disability: pneumoconioses such as silicosis and asbestosis, toxic dusts such as lead, metal-fume fever, and allergic reactions. On asbestosis, they described a diffuse fibrosis on X-ray without the nodules typical of silicosis. They also described asbestos fibers grouping about the necks of air sacs and shutting them off, a condition called atelectasis. They stated that this damage, like that of silicosis, was in general permanent. They added that prolonged exposure to these dusts greatly raised susceptibility to tuberculosis, more so from quartz than from asbestos. They wrote that asbestosis bodies in sputum were accepted as characteristic of asbestosis. A table credited to Bridge, for Great Britain through 1934, listed 41 deaths under asbestosis (average age at death 41.0, average 12.9 years of employment) and 26 under asbestosis with tuberculosis. The authors had no estimate of asbestos-exposed U.S. workers. A later footnote cited Lanza's figure of about 10,000 exposed persons and McPheeters' figure of 9237 exposed in 1929.

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. 002594. Barry Castleman cites it in chapter 2, "Cancer" and chapter 5, "Asbestos Product Use" and chapter 9, "Company Knowledge", of Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects (5th ed., 2005); see Reading Castleman.

We publish pages from a book 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.