Silicious Dusts of Undetermined Pathologic Status, from Occupational Medicine and Industrial Hygiene (1948)

This textbook chapter by R.T. Johnstone reviewed silica-containing dusts whose power to cause disabling lung scarring (fibrosis) was, the author said, undetermined. It reported no new study of its own. For talc, which the chapter said may be mined along with serpentine, dolomite and tremolite, it discussed several reports, three of which described asbestos bodies. A report by Porro and co-workers on fifteen talc-exposed workers described asbestosis bodies in the lung lesions and a degree of similarity between asbestosis and talc pneumoconiosis. An autopsy of a talc worker, reported by Porro and Levine, found asbestos bodies in some air sacs. A letter from a physician, Levy, described asbestosis bodies at autopsy in a talc-exposed man who had never been exposed to asbestos. It also quoted Canadian reports of lung disease among bauxite furnace workers, with 7 deaths among the cases identified. It described fibrosis in workers exposed to calcined diatomaceous earth, which appeared due to cristobalite and, to a lesser extent, tridymite. It noted that tripoli dust caused silicosis less often than expected. The author concluded that the status of these dusts remained open.

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. 002855.

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.