Industrial carcinogenesis and toxicology (1956)

This 1956 textbook chapter by M.W. Goldblatt and Judith Goldblatt was a review of occupational cancer, not a new study. The pages supplied include a section on asbestos, in which the authors gathered earlier published reports on asbestosis and lung cancer. They cited a 1947 factory inspectorate report by Merewether in which lung cancer was present in 13.2 per cent of 235 deaths caused by asbestosis. They also cited an estimate by Behrens (1952) of 44 lung carcinomas (14.2 per cent) among 309 published asbestosis cases, compared with 32 such tumours (1.4 per cent) among 2,204 silicosis cases. They noted that a Canadian report by Cartier made no mention of lung cancer among 22 asbestosis cases. They wrote that animal research by Gardner and co-workers had given no clue that asbestos causes cancer. They doubted a 1941 claim that 20 per cent of 100 mice exposed to asbestos dust developed cancer. The authors concluded that, for practical purposes, asbestos or a derivative of it could be regarded as a probable co-carcinogen in some cases of diffuse lung fibrosis. They said it was not yet possible to say whether fibrosis must come before the cancer.

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. 001843. Barry Castleman cites it in chapter 2, "Cancer", 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.