S. R. Zimmerman to Dr. Lewis J. Cralley Limiting Raybestos-Manhattan's Part in the Public Health Service Asbestos Study (1963)

A two-page letter of July 22, 1963, from S. R. Zimmerman, Jr., of Raybestos-Manhattan to Dr. Lewis J. Cralley of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, giving the company's answer on the proposed occupational health study of the asbestos products industry. After talks with company doctors, personnel departments and plant managers, the company limited its part to the Manheim, Pennsylvania, plant, citing disruption and expense, and agreed only to the dust-sampling (environmental) phase for now. Zimmerman wrote that some employees "may become unduly alarmed by the very nature of the study," so the company would withhold a decision on the medical phase, and offered instead the Manheim plant's medical records and "several thousand X-rays going back twenty years or more," read by an outside radiologist.

What it shows

The letter shows Raybestos-Manhattan keeping the Public Health Service's doctors away from its workers for the time being while offering its own X-ray files in their place, partly, it said, to avoid a part of the study "which we think could be alarming to our employees." It also confirms that the company held thousands of chest X-rays of Manheim workers going back twenty years or more. The dust sampling went ahead at Manheim in August 1964, and the results came back in November 1965 (Zimmerman's memo sending them on).

In Johns-Manville's index

Johns-Manville's attorneys indexed the Sumner Simpson Papers. Their index describes this document as follows:

Response to letter requesting RM participate in Occupational Health Study of the Asbestos Product Industry. Informs that approval to participate has been limited to Manheim, due to predicted disruption of production and the resulting costs. Manheim's participation is limited, at this time, to the environmental phase of the study. It is thought that participation in the medical phase may have a disruptive influence on employees.

Related documents

• S. R. Zimmerman to Dr. Lewis J. Cralley on Delaying a Reply About the Public Health Service Asbestos Study (1963)
• S. R. Zimmerman to R. L. Moore Sending the Public Health Service's Manheim Dust Results (1965)

About this copy

This is document 05827-05830 of the Sumner Simpson Papers, as numbered in the collection's index.