Captain Ernest W. Brown, "Industrial Hygiene and the Navy in National Defense" (1941)

A 14-page file with two items. First is a copy of a letter of January 11, 1941, from Paul V. McNutt, Federal Security Administrator, to the Secretary of the Navy, endorsing a recommendation that Navy manufacturing establishments use the industrial hygiene services of the U.S. Public Health Service. Second is an article by Captain Ernest W. Brown of the Navy Medical Corps, from War Medicine, describing how industrial hygiene was run in the navy yards. His table of occupational hazards lists "Asbestosis: makers of pipe insulating covers," and he reported a recent survey of the New York Navy Yard's pipe insulating shop, including X-rays, in which "No cases of asbestosis were found" among men with up to seventeen years' exposure.

What it shows

Brown called asbestosis "a potential occupation disease hazard due to inhalation of asbestos dust among workers engaged in the manufacture of asbestos insulating covers for flanges, valves and high temperature steam turbines." He wrote that similar findings had come from two other yards, "but the study should be extended to all men in this trade," and described the controls then used: a yearly chest X-ray, wetting the material, local exhaust ventilation, and a respirator "during the dustiest aspect of the process." He put the navy yards' civilian industrial force at about 130,000 and rising, with the commercial naval shipyards expected to pass 100,000. He also noted that the yards had no laboratory of their own for industrial hygiene studies and relied on the Public Health Service. The paper shows that by 1940 Navy medicine listed asbestosis among the occupational hazards of the navy yards, while naming only the shop workers who made insulating covers as exposed. Shipyard surveys later in the war looked at asbestos work more widely (Fleischer-Drinker Study).