Prospectus for Environmental Improvement: The Environmental Control Administration and Occupational Health (1969)

This item is not a research study. It is the text of remarks prepared by C.A. Hansen, Commissioner of the Environmental Control Administration in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, for a panel discussion at the American Public Health Association meeting in Philadelphia on November 11, 1969. Only excerpted pages are included. The speech presented no new asbestos data. On occupational health, the author described lung diseases from dust in mines and from fibers in asbestos plants and textile mills as prime occupational hazards. The author said their mechanisms were still imperfectly known and that the number of workers affected was disputed. Without giving a source in the excerpt, the author stated that asbestos workers had a lung cancer rate seven times higher than "the rest of us," and that airborne asbestos fibers cause asbestosis and cancer of the lung and of the pleura. The author said the hazard extended to construction workers handling asbestos materials and to people living near an asbestos mill or a construction site where asbestos was being used, putting the number exposed in the millions. The author concluded that something must be done quickly to control these hazards.

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.