Estimates of the fraction of cancer in the United States related to occupational factors (1978)

This 1978 report by scientists at the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health was not a new study. It used published data and government estimates to project the share of US cancer related to work exposures. For asbestos, it used an estimate that 8 to 11 million US workers had been exposed since World War II, about 4 million of them heavily. Citing earlier worker studies, it stated that 35-44% of heavily exposed workers who had died had died of lung cancer, pleural or peritoneal mesothelioma, or gastrointestinal cancers. It projected 2.0 to 2.3 million asbestos-related cancers. That averaged 58,000 to 75,000 cancer deaths a year over 30-35 years, or 13-18% of expected US cancer deaths. A cruder one-cohort method, counting only the roughly 1.6 million currently exposed asbestos workers, projected 13,900 asbestos cancers a year (an underestimate by a factor of 4-5, the authors said) and about 33,000 for five other substances. The authors concluded that estimates of at least 20% were more reasonable. They cautioned that the figures were not precise estimates.

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.

From J-M's medical library

This copy comes from the Johns-Manville medical library. It was among the papers J-M kept in its medical library without an index entry. Barry Castleman cites it in chapter 3, "Compensation: The Final Check-Up", of Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects (5th ed., 2005); see Reading Castleman.