Cancer of the lung in industry (1955)

This is an unsigned editorial in the British Medical Journal, not an original study. It reviewed evidence of lung cancer risk in certain industries, mainly a study of asbestos workers by R. Doll. In that study, coroners' necropsy records were available for 105 employees of a large asbestos works who died between 1933 and 1952 and in whom asbestosis was suspected as contributing to death. Lung cancer was found in 18, in 15 of them together with asbestosis. Doll then followed 113 men who had worked at least twenty years where they were liable to be exposed to asbestos dust. By June 1953, 39 had died against 15.4 expected from death rates of all men in England and Wales, including 11 lung cancer deaths against 0.8 expected. The editorial reported that this risk became progressively less as time worked under the old dusty conditions decreased. It also described a South Wales necropsy comparison by W. R. L. James, in which primary lung cancer was found in 3.3% of coal miners and 5.4% of non-miners. It stated there was no evidence that coal dust causes cancer.

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. 001856. Barry Castleman cites it in chapter 2, "Cancer", of Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects (5th ed., 2005); see Reading Castleman.

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.