Asbestos: Expedience, Exposure, and Human Experience

This undated set of lecture notes and slide-tape script, with no named authors, is not a research study: it reviews, for primary care physicians, what was known about asbestos and health, using figures from other sources. It cites a 1978 Surgeon General advisory: 20-25% of heavily exposed workers die of lung cancer 20 or more years after initial exposure, and seven to ten percent die of pleural or peritoneal mesothelioma. It also cites a federal projection that newly diagnosed cancers from past asbestos exposure would average 67,000 per year for 30-35 years, even with no further exposure. A cited Selikoff study of 632 New York and New Jersey insulation workers found 253 deaths where 196 were expected, and 42 lung cancer deaths where 6 were expected. A Selikoff survey of 3500 shipyard workers' families is cited as finding asbestos-induced x-ray changes in 35% of spouses and children. The document gives a mesothelioma latency of 3 to 55 years from first exposure, with a mean of 37 years. The authors stated that most of these cancer deaths were preventable.

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 this piece 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.