Asbestos Textile Institute Air Hygiene Committee Minutes on a Public Health Service Cancer Survey (1961)

Three pages of minutes of the Asbestos Textile Institute's Air Hygiene and Manufacturing Committee meeting of June 8, 1961, attended by men from Johns-Manville (including C. L. Sheckler), Raybestos-Manhattan, Keasbey & Mattison, U.S. Rubber, H. K. Porter and American Asbestos, with Dr. Kenneth Smith, J-M's medical director, as a guest. Smith spoke to a joint session "on a proposed survey of the Asbestos Industry by the United States Department of Public Health Service," which "would establish an impartial report proving whether there is a connection between Asbestosis and Cancer." The committee recommended that the institute's Board of Governors ask member companies to authorize such a request; the board decided to ballot the members.

What it shows

Four years earlier the same committee had voted down a lung cancer study of textile workers (ATI minutes, March 1957). By 1961 the question was back, with J-M's medical director proposing that the government do the study. The minutes also note that Dr. Wilson of the North Carolina State Board of Health was researching "if there is any connection between Asbestosis and Cancer," and that the committee had received the third annual report of the Asbestosis Research Council of England. They record, too, the members' view of a government dust-control speaker that "although we were not entirely successful in changing his opinions of us, we did make some progress with him."

In Johns-Manville's chronology

Johns-Manville's own chronology of what the company knew describes this document as follows:

ATI, in a meeting held 6/8/61, considered requesting USPHS survey re asbestos-cancer link.

Related documents

• Asbestos Textile Institute Air Hygiene Committee Minutes Rejecting a Lung Cancer Study (1957)