Your Job or Your Life (Health/PAC Bulletin) (1973)

This 1973 Health/PAC Bulletin article by Marsha Handelman and David Kotelchuck was not a research study. It was a journalistic case study of the Johns-Manville Corporation's asbestos plant in Manville, New Jersey, drawing on interviews with workers, families, union officials and a local doctor. It reported that the company's medical staff denied workers access to their medical records until 1971, and that awards for its asbestosis victims averaged $2,175 in 1970. It reprinted a table adapted from a study by Dr. Irving Selikoff and co-workers. The table covered 683 Manville plant workers from 1953 through 1971. Among them, it listed 27 lung cancer deaths (8.4 expected) and 13 gastrointestinal cancer deaths (5.0 expected). The table also listed 15 mesothelioma and 24 asbestosis deaths, without expected figures. A local surgeon reportedly diagnosed about 300 asbestosis and 70 mesothelioma cases in the area over ten years. The authors concluded that occupational health problems could not be treated simply as medical or technical problems.

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.