Selikoff, Pundsack and Hammond, "Fibrous Dust Respirator Protection: Designing for Workman Acceptance and Effectiveness" (1969)

An undated 35-page typescript paper by Dr. Irving J. Selikoff of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. F. L. Pundsack of the Johns-Manville Research and Engineering Center, and E. Cuyler Hammond of the American Cancer Society, supported in part by a U.S. Public Health Service grant. Surveys of the insulators' union found that only 3 percent of the New York and New Jersey insulation workers examined regularly wore masks and 70 percent never did; in a 1967 national questionnaire answered by 12,051 men, only 4 percent always wore a mask on dusty jobs. The men's most common complaints about the masks they knew were discomfort and difficulty breathing. The authors set out to design a mask insulation workers would actually wear, because "No mask is effective if it remains in the tool box or clothes locker."

What it shows

The paper reports work by J-M's research center on a disposable face mask for insulators. Testing filter media against a "standard" chrysotile dust it had prepared, the team found most existing masks over 99 percent efficient against chrysotile, but noted that amosite and crocidolite had not been tested. In two-day field trials with union members and an insulation contractor, men wearing a J-M prototype with an exhalation valve, the same mask without a valve, and a placebo preferred the valved mask, but fit at the nose and blocked downward vision were problems that required redesign. The authors wrote that although the risk of asbestosis had been known to insulation workers "for more than 35 years," few used respirators "even under obviously dusty conditions," and that masks "are not a substitute" for dust suppression. J-M's health committees were following the mask trials and planned for Pundsack to present the paper with Selikoff at a May 1969 medical meeting (Policy Committee minutes, February 1969; Scientific Relations Subcommittee, February 1969).

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

Respirator study shows inadequacy of prior styles. Titled "Fibrous Dust Respirator Protection: Designing for Workman Acceptance and Effectiveness" by Selikoff, EC Hammond, and Pundsack, partial grant from USPHS.