Asbestos Textile Institute Air Hygiene and Manufacturing Committee Minutes on Selikoff's Study and British Fiber Counting (1963)

Two pages of minutes of the Asbestos Textile Institute's Air Hygiene and Manufacturing Committee meeting of June 6, 1963, attended by C. L. Sheckler for Johns-Manville and members from Raybestos-Manhattan, American Asbestos Textile, U.S. Rubber and H. K. Porter. The committee was told that "a Dr. Sellakoff" would soon read a paper on about 1,500 workers, "largely in asbestos insulation applications, showing a very large incidence of lung cancer." The minutes say how scientific the study was "remains to be determined, but admittedly it will be damaging to the industry."

What it shows

In the afternoon, Dr. Lewis Cralley of the U.S. Public Health Service reported on his visit to England, where the Asbestos Research Council was sponsoring animal research and where dust was counted as fibers only rather than as total particles; he thought the two methods gave comparable results. He also described the Public Health Service study of the asbestos industry, with plant dust studies to begin that fall and medical exams late in 1964, starting in the textile branch. The minutes show the industry knew of Dr. Selikoff's insulator findings before they were presented (see the published paper), and that the Public Health Service study debated in 1961 was going ahead.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

Cralley (USPHS) advises ATI Air Hygiene and Manufacturing Committee on 6/6/63 that British now count only fibers and not particles.