Asbestos Bodies and Bioeffects - A Detective Story

Our plain-English summary of Asbestos Bodies and Bioeffects - A Detective Story, by P. Gross, R.T.P. DeTreville, J.M.G. Davis (1967).

The study

• Authors: P. Gross, R.T.P. DeTreville, J.M.G. Davis
• Published: Presented at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Industrial Hygiene Foundation, Chatham Center, PA. October 10-11. (1967)
• Type of article: Conference paper
• Our copy: from Johns-Manville's own medical library. The article is still under copyright, so we describe it here rather than post it.

In plain English

This conference paper outlined the history of the asbestos body, a coated fiber found in lungs. It was not a new study of people. The authors recounted work by others, including Wagner's 1960 report linking pleural mesothelioma to crocidolite (blue asbestos) in South African mining areas. They also cited autopsy studies that found what appeared to be asbestos bodies in 26 percent of cases in Capetown and 46 percent in the Pittsburgh area. They then described animal experiments. In Pittsburgh, hamsters were injected with dusts into the windpipe; in Cambridge, the dusts were injected into the pleural space between the membranes lining the lungs and chest wall. Aluminum silicate, glass fiber, carborundum, man-made textile fiber and elastin all produced bodies that looked very similar to asbestos bodies and whose coating contained iron. The authors concluded that such "ferruginous" bodies in the general population should not be assumed to be asbestos bodies until their mineral core is identified. They said this casts considerable doubt on the theory behind the asbestos "scare." They noted that identification depends almost entirely on laborious electron diffraction.

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.

What the study did and found

• Design: Narrative historical review presented at a conference, with an outline of animal injection experiments carried out in Pittsburgh and Cambridge
• Who was studied: Hamsters given dust into the windpipe (intratracheal injection) in Pittsburgh, and animals given intrapleural injections (into the pleural space) in Cambridge. The article does not state the species used in Cambridge or the numbers of animals.
• Exposure: Non-asbestos materials: aluminum silicate, glass fiber, carborundum, man-made textile fiber and elastin. These were compared with genuine asbestos bodies.
• Main results:
  • All the non-asbestos materials tested produced bodies that looked very similar to asbestos bodies under the light microscope.
  • Perl's stain showed that the coating of these bodies contained iron, as asbestos body coatings do.
  • Under the electron microscope, the coating of these ferruginous bodies, whatever the foreign material, consisted of small dense granules about 60 angstroms in diameter.
  • With elastin, the granular material was deposited inside the fibers rather than around the outside.
• The authors' conclusion: The authors concluded that ferruginous bodies seen in the lungs of the normal population must not be assumed to be asbestos bodies until their mineral core is identified. They said the assumption that asbestos-like bodies can only come from asbestos had proved incorrect, which casts considerable doubt on the theory behind the asbestos "scare." They also stated that, as far as they could see, the mesothelioma problem involved only users of crocidolite.
• Limitations the authors state:
  • Difficulty cutting thin sections of tissue containing glass fiber or aluminum silicate had so far prevented electron microscope photographs of the same quality as those of genuine asbestos bodies.
  • Accurate identification of the fiber cores relies almost entirely on electron diffraction, which involves a great deal of work. A study of what percentage of human ferruginous bodies come from asbestos had only just begun.

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Asbestos Bodies, Pleural Mesothelioma, Crocidolite, Autopsy, Silicate.

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