Environmental Exposure to Asbestos: A Factor in the Rising Rate of Cancer in the Industrialized World? (1979)

This article is an editorial, not a research study. The author commented on a case-control study by Churg and Warnock, published in Chest, which counted asbestos bodies in lung samples from patients who died with lung or gastrointestinal cancer and from matched controls. As the editorial reported it, counts were higher in men and in people in exposed occupations, but were not related to cancer at either site. The author wrote that this gave no evidence that low-level urban asbestos exposure contributed to these cancers, but did not exonerate it. The author wrote that the method was likely much less powerful for common, smoking-linked cancers such as lung cancer, and that short uncoated fibers were not counted. The author also noted that more than 90 percent of commercial asbestos is chrysotile, yet the fiber core of most asbestos bodies in urban dwellers' lungs is amphibole. For pleural and peritoneal mesothelioma, the author saw no reason to change the Lyon conference conclusion of no evidence of risk to the general public at present. The author urged physicians to take complete work histories.

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.