NBC's Meet the Press, Sunday, June 25, 1978. The Environment: How Cancerous?

This is not a research study. It is a transcript of the NBC television program Meet the Press, broadcast on June 25, 1978 from New York City during a week-long New York Academy of Sciences conference on environmental health hazards. It was printed as an appendix in the Annals. Reporters questioned six guests: Selikoff (Mount Sinai School of Medicine), Upton (National Cancer Institute), Kotin (Johns-Manville Corporation), Wolfe (Health Research Group), Kennedy (Food and Drug Administration) and Mazzocchi (Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers International Union). Topics included asbestos, saccharin, benzene and radiation. On asbestos, Selikoff said that one in five asbestos workers dies of lung cancer, and that government and industry had not done their jobs until recently. Mazzocchi said that less than one percent of employers in the union's industry complied with the asbestos standard. Wolfe described the workplace standard falling from twelve to five and soon to one or lower; this text gives no units. Kotin distinguished responsible from trivial uses of asbestos. Selikoff saw no alternative yet to asbestos in brake linings but asked for protection of brake repair workers. These are statements by the speakers, not study findings.

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.