Characteristics and Etiology of Parenchymal Asbestosis (1978)

This book chapter was a review of the published medical literature on parenchymal asbestosis, which it defined as changes within the lung tissue itself, apart from pleural disease, mesothelioma or cancer. The authors combined published studies with twenty years of experience at Mount Sinai. They described the disease's pathology, symptoms, lung function and X-ray findings, and weighed the evidence that asbestos causes it. Among the studies reviewed, Merewether and Price found fibrosis attributable to asbestos dust in 95 of 363 English asbestos manufacturing workers. Wagner and colleagues found that all five mineral types tested were fibrogenic in rats. The chapter reported asbestosis deaths among United States and Canadian insulation workers from January 1967 to December 1971. There were 5 deaths among 12,661 workers with less than 20 years since first exposure, and 73 among 5,119 with 20 years or more. Clinical signs of pulmonary asbestosis were uncommon in family contacts of amosite workers examined at Mount Sinai. The authors concluded that the evidence was overwhelming for a genuine causative relationship. They noted that doses were seldom known and that no experimental animal had yet been found that reacts exactly like humans.

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. 004070.

We publish pages from a book 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.