Casualties of the Workplace II - That Dust has ate us up

Our plain-English summary of Casualties of the Workplace II - That Dust has ate us up, by P. Brodeur (1973).

The study

• Author: P. Brodeur
• Published: The New Yorker, November 5, 1973
• Type of article: Trade journal article
• 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 New Yorker article, the second in the author's series on disease in the workplace, is journalism, not a scientific study. It recounted events of 1971 and 1972 at Pittsburgh Corning's amosite-asbestos insulation plant in Tyler, Texas, which the company said it had closed. Physicians from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the company's medical consultant jointly concluded that at least seven of the eighteen workers employed there more than ten years had symptoms and signs consistent with asbestosis. A plant manager had died of mesothelioma in 1970. In a four-minute NIOSH test, a person handled a burlap bag that had held asbestos and been sold to a nursery. The average around the handler was four hundred and ninety asbestos fibres longer than five microns per cubic centimetre of air. Federal inspectors fined the company two hundred and ten dollars and later proposed additional penalties of six thousand nine hundred and ninety dollars. Interviewed workers described breathlessness and coughing. Several said no one had told them asbestos was dangerous until the summer of 1971, and one recalled an earlier warning from a former plant manager.

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: Magazine article (investigative journalism based on interviews and inspection reports); the second of a series. Not a scientific study.
• Who was studied: Workers at the Pittsburgh Corning amosite-asbestos insulation plant in Tyler, Texas, which opened in 1954 and closed in early 1972; the article focuses on the workers employed there in 1971 and 1972 and on former workers.
• Exposure: Amosite asbestos used to make insulation at the Tyler plant; also asbestos dust in burlap bags that had held the asbestos and were sold to local nurseries.
• Main results:
  • NIOSH physicians and the company's medical consultant announced a joint conclusion that at least seven of the eighteen workers with more than ten years of employment at the Tyler plant had symptoms and signs consistent with asbestosis.
  • A manager of the plant had died of mesothelioma in 1970, according to a NIOSH physician quoted in the article.
  • In a NIOSH test of a contaminated burlap bag taken from a Tyler nursery, the average concentration of asbestos fibres longer than five microns around the person handling it, over the four minutes the operation took, was four hundred and ninety fibres per cubic centimetre of air. The article describes this as ninety-eight times the five-fibre emergency standard.
  • The Occupational Safety and Health Administration treated the violations at the plant as nonserious. It fined Pittsburgh Corning two hundred and ten dollars. After a reinspection it proposed additional penalties totalling six thousand nine hundred and ninety dollars.
  • Interviewed Tyler workers described shortness of breath and coughing. Several said no one had told them asbestos was dangerous until the summer of 1971. One worker recalled that a former plant manager had told him years earlier that the material could be harmful.
• The authors' conclusion: The author argued that workers like those at the Tyler plant were treated as expendable and, once disabled or retired, became no one's responsibility.

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Pittsburgh Corning, Amosite, NIOSH, Mesothelioma.

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