Asbestos Prevalence (1972)

This 1972 progress report from a research group described three pieces of ongoing work on asbestosis. In June 1972 the authors re-examined 150 of 195 shipyard workers first studied in 1965 and 1966, and were still tracing the rest. The data were still being analyzed. Preliminary results suggested that their 1966 estimate of how common the disease was had underestimated the problem. Five of twelve workers diagnosed with asbestosis had died of cardiopulmonary disease, four others showed obvious progression, and there were probably ten new cases. In pipe coverers, exposure duration was linked to a rales (crackling lung sound) score about as closely as to more complex lung function tests. Most rales from asbestos workers had frequency peaks between 500 and 800 (the unit is unreadable in the scan), unlike the lower-frequency rales of pneumonia and heart failure. Ultrasound appeared to separate selected normal people from exposed people whose pleural thickening or plaques already showed on X-ray, but more work was needed. The authors believed lung-sound methods might aid early detection of diffuse lung disorders, and that ultrasound might help monitor workers exposed to pneumoconiosis-producing dusts.

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.