The Cancer Syndrome (Excerpt) (1980)

This is a chapter, "Asbestos: The Harvest of Death," from Ralph W. Moss's book The Cancer Syndrome, a critical account of the cancer establishment. It is not an original study. The author drew on journalists, court documents and other researchers' work. The author argued that asbestos companies, including Johns-Manville and Raybestos-Manhattan, tried to limit publicity about asbestos hazards and influenced industry-funded research. One example was a Metropolitan Life study of 126 workers. By the author's reading of its data, 67 of them definitely had asbestosis, 39 may have had it, and only 20 appeared free of it. The author quoted Irving Selikoff's follow-up of 632 men in a New York pipefitters union from 1943 to 1977. That group had 210 cancer deaths where 56 were expected, and 93 lung cancer deaths where 13 were expected. The chapter also described asbestos released during 1976 renovations at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the closing of schools over asbestos, and asbestos plants moving to poorer countries. The author concluded that the industry had sidestepped its responsibility and that asbestos continued to enter the environment virtually unchecked.

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.