Environmental Mistakes: Responsibilities, Opportunities (1977)

This is a short opinion article by the author, Irving J. Selikoff of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. It is not a research study and reports no new data. The author argued that knowing the causes of cancer creates opportunities to control harmful exposures and to help people exposed years ago who are now at high risk. The author pointed to the long delay between exposure and cancer, using vinyl chloride, thymus radiation and cigarette smoking as examples. The author cited a Public Health Service calculation that about 1,000,000 people were current or former "asbestos workers" from 1930 to a later year that is damaged in the scan. The damaged scan appears to say that up to 7 percent of them would develop mesothelioma. The author added that 3 times as many would die of lung cancer, and that the projection left out people who were not "asbestos workers" but were significantly exposed in shipyards or at home through fibers on a worker's clothes. In the Insulation Workers union of 18,000 members, the author wrote, a mesothelioma death occurred almost every two weeks. The author expressed hope that a newly established Mesothelioma Therapy Research Program might allow very early diagnosis and treatment.

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.