Biological Effects of Ingested Asbestos: Status Report (1981)

This document was a short government status report from the National Toxicology Program, not a research paper with final results. It described lifetime feeding studies of ingested asbestos run by the NIEHS, with about 10% of funding from the Environmental Protection Agency. The materials tested were two samples of chrysotile, one each of amosite and crocidolite, and a tremolite material. In hamsters fed three asbestos materials at IIT Research Institute in Chicago, the report found no indication of major differences in death rates between asbestos-fed and control hamsters. It also stated that a preliminary analysis showed no cancer-causing effect, and no effect of strengthening the action of another cancer-causing agent. Quality review of the male hamsters was still in progress. In rats at Hazleton Laboratories in Vienna, Virginia, five materials were tested, and two of the studies also included exposure of newborn rats. Before any statistical analysis, lifespan appeared unaffected by the fibers. The report said that something it described as "known", followed by words that are unreadable in the scan, did significantly shorten lifespan. Tissue examination of 5,158 rats was still underway.

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.