Contribution of the Environment to Incidence: An Epidemiologic Exercise (1977)

This guest editorial was not an original study of asbestos. The authors estimated how much cancer could be attributed to environmental factors such as tobacco, diet, sunlight, pollution, drugs and jobs, also drawing on other researchers' studies. For each cancer site, they compared mortality and incidence rates of U.S. whites, and of the highest-rate population, with the lowest-rate population; these populations included some U.S. groups such as nonwhites and Hawaii. The female mortality table was dated 1966 to 1970; the male table's date was unreadable. They reported large differences between countries such as the United States and Japan. Men and women differed most for tobacco-related cancers; lung cancer death rates in U.S. men rose steeply over time, while stomach cancer deaths fell sharply. Asbestos was listed in a table of occupations linked to lung cancer. As far as the damaged scan shows, the authors said asbestos and uranium dust had synergistic effects with cigarette smoke, raising smokers' lung cancer risk, and that both were linked to cancer without smoking. The authors concluded that the data supported the view that cancer is produced by environmental factors. They noted that vital statistics vary in quality by country.

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.

We publish an editorial 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.