Visite du chantier naval de l'Atlantique, Saint-Nazaire (French) (1969)

This untranslated French meeting report, supplied as heavily garbled OCR text, is not a research study. It describes a 28 November 1969 visit to the Chantiers de l'Atlantique shipyard at Saint-Nazaire and a physicians' meeting the next day at the Nantes Faculty of Medicine. At the shipyard, workers were exposed to asbestos dust mainly when sawing heat-insulation shells. The visitors judged the risk fairly small, though that line is garbled. The text states that two of the doctors represented the Chambre Syndicale de l'Amiante. At the meeting, the shipyard's doctor reported workers with pleural calcifications. Of these, 36 had certain contact with asbestos; the total number of cases and the workforce size are garbled in the text and cannot be confirmed. A Nantes shipyard doctor reported 13 cases of pleural calcifications in a workforce of 3,500, or 6,000 after a company merger. A hospital doctor reported 15 operated mesothelioma cases, 7 of them from shipbuilding and none with pleural calcifications. The report concluded that the X-rays shown from the shipyard were undoubtedly images of calcifications due to asbestos. It raised a possible role for iron dust and said investigations would continue.

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.