Concept and Significance of Occupational Tumors

This text is a review-style book chapter on occupational tumors, including part of a section on cancers of the respiratory system. The author reviewed the definition and statistics of work-related cancers and criticized death certificates as a basis for such statistics. The author described amphibole and serpentine types of asbestos and named inhalation of asbestos dust as the chief hazard. The author cited autopsy series of workers with asbestosis in which lung cancer was found in 2 of 17 cases (Nordmann) and in 2 or possibly 3 of 12 cases (Wood). Lynch and Smith found 2 lung cancers (six per cent) in apparently 35 autopsies with asbestosis, against 0.3 per cent in approximately 2,300 general-population autopsies. A death-certificate analysis by Kennaway and Kennaway found no lung cancer in asbestos workers. The author concluded that common silica dusts had no cancer-causing properties with respect to lung cancer, but that this might not apply to asbestos. The author judged lung cancer in asbestosis definitely excessive, noted the small number of autopsies behind that view, and called for extensive investigation.

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 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.