Fleischer, Viles, Gade and Drinker, "A Health Survey of Pipe Covering Operations in Constructing Naval Vessels" (1946)

An eight-page article in the January 1946 Journal of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology, known as the Fleischer-Drinker Study. Navy and Maritime Commission health consultants X-rayed 1,074 pipe coverers at two Navy yards and two private contract yards and took dust counts of their work. They found three cases of asbestosis, each in a man who had done the work for more than 20 years, and concluded that shipyard pipe covering "is not a dangerous occupation."

What it shows

The study began because an earlier inspection of one Navy contract yard had found heavy dust and "a few of the employees" with what looked like asbestosis. The authors' own counts were high: band saw cutting, cement mixing and installation on board ship produced total dust well above the 5 million particles per cubic foot that the U.S. Public Health Service had suggested for asbestos textile plants (the Dreessen study), and few workers wore respirators. The authors explained the low number of cases by the way pipe coverers moved from job to job, and wrote that it was "manifestly impossible to set a threshold" for this trade. Most of the men had worked fewer than ten years, and the three cases appeared only among those with 20 or more. The article's conclusion was cited for years afterward to argue that insulation work was safe.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

Fleischer-Drinker report published (first study of workers using asbestos-containing products); concludes pipe covering in shipyards not a dangerous occupation; finds only three asbestosis cases (in workers with twenty plus exposure years) among 1,074 insulators. Study later criticized due short exposure period of most subjects in spite of recognized latency period. "Total dust counts" were above TLV but "asbestos counts" were within TLV.

01/1946

Editor's note: J-M's description says the total dust counts were above the threshold limit but the asbestos counts were within it. The article sets no separate limit for asbestos dust and says that, given the varied dust exposure in this trade, it was "manifestly impossible to set a threshold."