Health Screening Examinations for Workers Who Have Been Exposed to Asbestos (1978)

This is not a research study. It is testimony given to a California Senate committee on December 12, 1978, by the author, a physician and medical advisor to the Western States Asbestos Health Plan, on whether to screen people exposed to asbestos. The author described earlier work with Local 16 of the Asbestos Workers Union. That work found that a large proportion of members had asbestosis, and that lung cancer deaths were seven times expected among men with 20 or more years in the trade. The author's files held records on about 1,300 current or former asbestos workers. About one-fourth of those examined had definite asbestosis, and the examinations found only one early operable cancer. Local 16 had 99 deaths from 1967 through 1978, and 53 of them were from cancer: 25 lung cancer, 11 malignant mesothelioma, six gastrointestinal tract tumors and 11 other sites. The expected number of cancer deaths cannot be read in the scan. The author did not recommend mass screening, calling its benefit dubious, and favored spending on prevention and on reforming workers' compensation.

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.

We publish this piece for research and commentary: it shows what the medical literature in a leading asbestos company's own library said on the subject, and when. Our summary above is our own reading of it. The copyright stays with the publisher.