Asbestos Information Committee, Asbestos: Its Special Attributes and Uses (1975)

A 34-page color booklet, "asbestos: its special attributes and uses," published in London by the Asbestos Information Committee, the British asbestos industry's information body, and printed in May 1975 (price £1.50). It describes the asbestos minerals and their properties and the uses of asbestos in textiles, millboard, jointings and packings, building, electrical and shipbuilding products, brake and clutch linings and reinforced plastics, with photographs of British asbestos plants and tables of fiber and composite properties. A two-page closing section, "Asbestos and health," says that "many asbestos products are quite harmless in use" provided that "certain practical precautions are taken."

What it shows

The health section says that cases of disease then being diagnosed came from exposures "thirty or more years ago when, in some instances, the standards of hygiene and of dust control were much lower than they are today," and points to the Asbestos Regulations 1969, medical surveillance and the work of the Asbestosis Research Council. The booklet's photographs, provided "mainly by members of the asbestos industry," show workers spinning and weaving asbestos and handling millboard without respirators, alongside a page on dust extraction and lung testing. The same committee's commentary on Nancy Tait's pamphlet is in the Library (Nancy Tait, Asbestos Kills - New Facts 1977, with the Asbestos Information Committee's Commentary (1977)).