Asbestos Air Pollution in New York City: Statement on a Planned Study (1971)

The supplied text carries the cited title but names no authors. It reads as a statement by an unnamed speaker, apparently for New York City's Department of Air Resources, to a Medical Advisory Committee. The speaker noted that Dr. Irving Selikoff had presented strong evidence to the committee that occupational exposure to asbestos had resulted in asbestosis and cancer. The department had already begun an inventory of asbestos-related activities in New York and planned to work with the Mt. Sinai Environmental Sciences Laboratory. Air sampling was still being planned, so the text reported no air measurements and no new health findings. Air was to be sampled at five sites without suspected asbestos sources and three sites with suspected sources. The whole project was expected to last about fifteen months. A table listed eight New York City buildings that used asbestos fireproofing compound, 4,459,223 pounds in total. The compound was described as 30% asbestos fibers and 60% mineral wool, with the rest binder. The speaker said attention was focused on fireproofing sprays and demolition dust. The speaker asked whether existing evidence justified regulating them right away.

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. 004326.

We publish this piece 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.