Occupational Health Standards: What Are the Priorities? (1979)

This was an editorial, not a research study, and it did not discuss asbestos. The authors commented on a report by Perkins and Rose, published in the same journal issue, about how the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) set priorities for its criteria documents. The authors wrote that, so far, NIOSH criteria documents had tried to drive Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards, rather than the two agencies setting priorities together. They stated that developing these documents, together with the research associated with them, used more than 50 per cent of NIOSH's research funds. They wrote that each document cost less than $30,000 in 1972, and that some recent documents cost far more, a rise they said outstripped inflation and did not reflect better quality. The authors said the documents often contained uncritical summaries of the scientific literature. They argued that a standard combines social, economic, political and scientific issues, and that a criteria document need not end in a numerical exposure limit. The authors concluded that the Act needed stable leadership and cooperation between NIOSH and OSHA. They wrote that NIOSH should remain the scientific branch.

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.