Asbestosis and Pleural Tumours (1959)

This Dutch article, available here as an English translation, described three insulators. Their work included removing old conductors in poorly ventilated rooms with dust high in asbestos fibers. Patient A, aged 67, had worked with asbestos for 41 years. At autopsy a large tumor surrounded his right lung; it had mesothelioma features and probably started from the pleura. Patient B, aged 67, had worked with asbestos for 13 years. He had rather serious asbestosis and a tumor enclosing the left lower lobe, similar in structure to Patient A's. Patient C, aged 57, had worked in insulation for an unknown time. At autopsy he had a fibrosarcoma and a moderate number of asbestos bodies in the lungs. No asbestos fibers were found inside the bronchi or bronchioli in these cases. The author suggested that fibers reaching the outer lung irritated the pleura, and so traced the link between asbestosis and lung cancer to these pleural tumors. Without exact data, the author assumed that about 20% of workers in the asbestos-fabricating insulation industry in the western Netherlands had some degree of 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. 005433. Barry Castleman cites it in chapter 2, "Cancer", of Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects (5th ed., 2005); see Reading Castleman.

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.