Occupational Epidemiology (1981)

This item is a section of a textbook on occupational epidemiology, not a new study. The author used two published studies by other researchers to discuss whether asbestos causes lung cancer in people who do not smoke cigarettes. The first was a cohort of 17,800 asbestos insulation workers. Smoking habits were obtained from 11,656 of them in 1967, and they were followed for lung cancer deaths. In the first analysis the author saw no evidence of excess lung cancer among nonsmokers, but noted that many workers had unknown smoking habits. A later analysis, with more follow-up, suggested that nonsmoking insulation workers also had an excess. The second was a case-control study of lung cancer among residents of coastal Georgia, where World War II shipbuilding involved asbestos exposure. The odds ratio for shipbuilding was 1.3 among non or light smokers and 2.4 among heavy smokers. Only 175 people had worked in shipyards. The author concluded that the data were too sparse to say with certainty whether asbestos without cigarette smoke is a lung carcinogen.

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.