Asbestosis, from Occupational Lung Diseases (1975)

This textbook chapter by Anthony Seaton is a review of asbestosis, the lung scarring caused by breathing asbestos. It reports no new study of its own. The author described the main fiber types (chrysotile and the amphiboles crocidolite, amosite, anthophyllite and tremolite), how asbestos is mined and used, and which jobs involve exposure. Citing earlier work, the chapter reported that the number of workers newly certified with asbestosis in Great Britain rose from twenty in 1951 to fifty-three in 1961 and 145 in 1971. It also reported that Selikoff and colleagues found signs of the disease in 10 per cent of insulation workers within ten years of starting the trade, 50 per cent within twenty years, and almost all after more than twenty. The chapter covered symptoms, X-ray and lung function findings, pathology, pleural plaques and theories of how fibers cause scarring. The author noted that no completely satisfactory data relate the disease to total dust exposure. The author concluded that controlling how much asbestos workers are exposed to is the essential factor in preventing asbestosis.

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. 002868.

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.