Selikoff Studies

The Selikoff studies are a series of papers on the health of asbestos insulation workers by Dr. Irving J. Selikoff of Mount Sinai in New York, written with E. Cuyler Hammond of the American Cancer Society and Dr. Jacob Churg.^1,2 The first was published in April 1964, and the work was presented in full that October at a three-day Conference on Biological Effects of Asbestos held by the New York Academy of Sciences, which Selikoff and Churg co-chaired.^1,3 The conference, its published proceedings and the asbestos industry's response to it run through many documents in the Library, from trade-group minutes to trial records.

The first insulation-worker studies

The first paper was read before the American College of Chest Physicians on June 17, 1963, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on April 6, 1964.¹ It followed 632 insulation workers in New York and Newark who had joined the trade before 1943; of the 255 who died, 45 died of cancer of the lung or pleura, where 6.6 such deaths were expected.¹ The men were not factory or mine workers but insulators who used finished asbestos products, with what the authors called "relatively light, intermittent" exposure.¹ The authors also wrote that electricians, plumbers, sheet-metal workers and steamfitters working beside the insulators might share the exposure.¹

In April 1968 the same authors reported on 370 union insulators followed from 1963 to 1967.² Of 283 men with a history of regular cigarette smoking, 24 died of lung cancer, and none of the 87 men who did not smoke cigarettes did.² They calculated that "asbestos workers who smoke have about 92 times the risk" of dying of lung cancer as men who neither worked with asbestos nor smoked.² Selikoff testified about the insulation-worker research before a House subcommittee on March 7, 1968, during hearings on a federal workplace safety bill.⁴

The 1964 conference

The Academy's printed program lists the conference for October 19 to 21, 1964, at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, with one evening session at the Academy's building on East 63rd Street.³ Its preface says Selikoff visited European research centers in October 1963 on the Academy's behalf to plan it, and calls cancers linked to asbestos "perhaps the most important industrial cancers at this time."³ The organizing committee included Hammond, Dr. J. C. Gilson of Britain's Pneumoconiosis Research Unit and Thomas F. Mancuso of the University of Pittsburgh.³ The opening paper on asbestos geology and uses was given by N. W. Hendry of Canadian Johns-Manville, and Dr. Kenneth W. Smith of Johns-Manville spoke on "Trends in the Health of the Asbestos Worker."^3,5

The preprinted abstracts include the Mount Sinai papers on asbestosis and on cancer among insulators.⁵ G. J. Stopps of the Du Pont Company summarized them in a trip report of November 2, 1964: the study covered 1,522 members of the insulators' union in the New York–New Jersey area, and an analysis of 307 consecutive deaths found 53 lung cancers, 9 pleural mesotheliomas and 25 cancers of the digestive tract.⁶ Stopps also recorded papers from Britain, Northern Ireland and South Africa linking mesothelioma to asbestos exposure, including exposure outside the asbestos industry.⁶ He concluded that the risk to people "not normally thought of as engaged in work with asbestos" was "greater than was originally thought."⁶

Stopps counted some 53 papers, only two of them from people connected with the asbestos industry in the United States and Canada, against seven from the British industry.⁶ In a 1978 review, Dr. Philip E. Enterline counted 65 papers, of which 23 dealt with asbestos and cancer and 20 supported a relationship.⁷ Enterline wrote that the question of whether asbestos caused lung cancer and mesothelioma "was settled at the 1964 conference."⁷ His preface says the Asbestos Information Association, the industry's trade group, gave financial support for the review.⁷

What the industry's records say about the conference

The Asbestos Textile Institute followed the conference closely. Minutes of its Air Hygiene Committee for June 4, 1964, say the Institute "will not take an active part" in the conference but that member companies would likely want to attend.⁸ At the same meeting, Dr. Lewis J. Cralley of the U.S. Public Health Service reported on his survey of dust levels in six American plants.⁸

On October 8, 1964, the committee wrote that "since they are linking asbestos with cancer," the conference "will have an effect on the entire Industry," and asked how its results could be "investigated and rebutted."⁹ The Institute's Board of Governors met the same day and had its lawyers draft a letter to Selikoff urging "caution" in public discussion of his research; the minutes do not show whether it was sent.¹⁰ On October 13, Johns-Manville's medical director, Kenneth W. Smith, advised in a confidential memo that the company "do nothing to try to refute present newspaper articles," and wrote that J-M had "worked diligently for nearly a year" to broaden the conference program.¹¹

The Academy prepared press releases for the conference.¹² One, dated for release October 20, 1964, reported that of 307 insulators who had died in the past 20 years, 20 percent had lung cancer.¹² In a letter of November 6, 1964, the Institute's president, John A. Brown, Jr., told a member company that men from Johns-Manville and North American Asbestos had found the releases before they went out, and that objections at the meeting "because of the sensationalism of the material" held them up.¹² He asked that the matter not be brought to the attention of anyone but the companies' management.¹² In February 1965 the Board discussed the "unfavorable publicity" from the conference and the need for "standardized answers" for customers, and proposed asking Cralley to help shape them.¹³

Later industry accounts look back on the conference differently. In a 1973 letter to The New York Times Magazine, Matthew M. Swetonic of the Asbestos Information Association wrote that after the symposium a group of textile manufacturers asked the Public Health Service to investigate their industry.¹⁴ The Institute's own June 1964 minutes, written before the conference, already record Cralley reporting on that survey.⁸ In a speech the same year, Swetonic called it "Dr. Selikoff's now famous 1964 seminar," which he said "did much to prick the industry's conscience about asbestos and health."¹⁵

The proceedings and their reach

The proceedings were published by the Academy as Biological Effects of Asbestos, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, volume 132, article 1, pages 1 to 766.^16,17 Interrogatory answers and a deposition summary in the Library date the volume to December 31, 1965.^18,19 A 1967 memorandum of Britain's Factory Inspectorate wrote that existing knowledge of asbestos and mesothelioma "was brought together and amplified" at the conference, and noted that the proceedings had been published.¹⁷ The U.S. Bureau of Mines' Minerals Yearbook for 1964 recorded the conference and its panels on asbestosis, dust control and asbestos and cancer.²⁰ A 1978 Oak Ridge National Laboratory report listed it as the first of two major national meetings on asbestos health hazards, the second being held in 1974.²¹ After the conference the Academy set up a Division of Environmental Sciences, according to a June 1965 Institute meeting, and Selikoff told Congress in 1968 that he had chaired it and was the Academy's president-elect.^4,22

The studies in litigation

The papers from the proceedings appear in asbestos lawsuits. Borel v. Fibreboard was the Texas case that first held asbestos manufacturers strictly liable for failing to warn the insulators who used their products.²³ At its 1971 trial, the plaintiff's lawyer read into the record a doctor's opinions on a series of Selikoff papers from the Annals, including that the paper on asbestosis among insulation workers was "an authoritative article."²³ The defense objected to each of the Selikoff articles as hearsay, and the court overruled the objection.²³ In 1984 interrogatory answers, Celotex said its predecessor made its Careytemp insulation asbestos-free in 1969, and that the removal "came shortly after the general acceptance of Dr. Selikoff's study."²⁴ The same answers argued that the insulators Selikoff studied had worked in decades when dust control was lacking and with products containing more asbestos.¹⁸ Union Carbide's interrogatory answers from 2001 show plaintiffs asking which of its employees attended the October 1964 Academy conference; Union Carbide objected that the question was overly broad.²⁵

Later Academy conferences

The Academy held further meetings on asbestos and cancer. On March 24, 1975, NIOSH scientists presented papers on hard rock gold miners exposed to an asbestos-like mineral at its Conference on Occupational Carcinogenesis.²⁶ Comments by Dr. Hans Weill that the Asbestos Information Association circulated in 1976 said that study had drawn "considerable attention."²⁷ Selikoff's report on 1,249 insulators followed from 1963 to 1974 appeared in 1976 in volume 271 of the Annals, a volume on occupational carcinogens.^28,29 In June 1978 the Academy's Science Week included a conference on the health effects of asbestos exposure, which Asbestos magazine announced that spring.³⁰ Its proceedings, Health Hazards of Asbestos Exposure, edited by Selikoff and Hammond, contained 84 papers in 815 pages, and were published in 1979 as volume 330 of the Annals.^31,32 They include Hammond, Selikoff and Seidman's study of 17,800 insulation workers in the United States and Canada followed from 1967 to 1976, on asbestos, smoking and death rates.^32,33 Asbestos also reported a paper from that conference on unexpected cases of mesothelioma in two Turkish villages that had no asbestos-related activity but where the mineral zeolite occurs naturally.³⁴

Related Terms

Synergistic Effect, State of the Art, Failure to Warn, Epidemiology, Latency Period, Insulator, Asbestos Workers Union, Mesothelioma, Asbestosis, Lung Cancer, Smoking Defense, Asbestos Textile Industry

References

1. Irving J. Selikoff, Jacob Churg and E. Cuyler Hammond, "Asbestos Exposure and Neoplasia" (1964)
2. Irving J. Selikoff, E. Cuyler Hammond and Jacob Churg, Asbestos Exposure, Smoking, and Neoplasia (1968)
3. New York Academy of Sciences, Program of the Conference on Biological Effects of Asbestos (1964), pp. 1–6
4. Occupational Safety and Health: Hearings Before the Select Subcommittee on Labor, House of Representatives, on H.R. 14816 (1968), pp. 3–7
5. New York Academy of Sciences, Preprinted Abstracts for the Conference on Biological Effects of Asbestos (1964)
6. ATI-116: G. J. Stopps to J. A. Zapp, Jr., Trip Report on New York Academy of Sciences Conference on Biological Effects of Asbestos (1964), pp. 1–7
7. Philip E. Enterline, Asbestos and Cancer: The First Thirty Years (1978), pp. 6, 61–62
8. Asbestos Textile Institute Air Hygiene Committee on Dr. Cralley's Progress Report (1964), pp. 1, 4
9. Asbestos Textile Institute Air Hygiene Committee on Rebutting the Biological Effects of Asbestos Conference (1964)
10. Asbestos Textile Institute Minutes on Selikoff's Conference and a Lawyer's Letter to Selikoff (1964), p. 1
11. Kenneth W. Smith to C. W. Hite on Asbestos and Cancer Publicity (1964)
12. ATI-51: John A. Brown, Jr. to J. T. Griffis, Transmitting Unreleased New York Academy of Sciences News Releases on Asbestos (1964), pp. 1–2
13. Asbestos Textile Institute Board of Governors on Adverse Publicity from the 1964 Conference (1965), p. 1
14. AIA-36: Matthew M. Swetonic to the Editor of The New York Times Magazine on the Sherrill Asbestos Article (1973), p. 3
15. UC-4226: John H. Marsh (AIA/NA) to William S. Sneath Forwarding Swetonic's Speech "Why Asbestos?" (1973), p. 5
16. UC-3664: R. H. Mereness (AIA) to Executive Committee Forwarding Dr. Enterline's Editorial (1978), p. 6
17. UC-4295: HM Factory Inspectorate, Problems Arising from the Use of Asbestos (1967), pp. 18, 31
18. Celotex's Answers to Plaintiff's Master Interrogatories in Laird v. Celotex (1984), p. 25
19. The Borel v. Fibreboard Case File, Deposition summary, Dr. Jenkins, part 1, p. 2
20. Minerals Yearbook: Asbestos Chapters, 1964, p. 10
21. Asbestos: A Perspective (1978), pp. 9–10
22. Asbestos Textile Institute General Meeting at Thetford Mines (1965), p. 5
23. The Borel v. Fibreboard Case File: summary, and Trial transcript, volume I, pp. 150–152
24. Celotex's Answers to Plaintiff's Master Interrogatories in Laird v. Celotex (1984), p. 37
25. UC-2045: Union Carbide's Objections and Responses to Interrogatories, Garcia v. Owens-Corning (2001), p. 9
26. UC-1605: Ralph Zumwalde (NIOSH) to E. A. Piersall Enclosing Two Papers on Hard Rock Gold Miners (1976), pp. 2, 22
27. AIA-26: R. H. Mereness to Participants in Asbestos Industry Response, Forwarding Dr. Hans Weill's Comments (1976), p. 7
28. UC-1453: I. J. Selikoff, Lung Cancer and Mesothelioma During Prospective Surveillance of 1249 Asbestos Insulation Workers, 1963–1974 (1976)
29. Selected Silicate Minerals and their Asbestiform Varieties (1977), p. 64
30. Asbestos, April 1978, p. 58
31. Asbestos, November 1980, p. 40
32. UC-3030: H. C. Lewinsohn to S. L. Baye and Others Transmitting Draft OSHA Asbestos Standard Testimony (1984), p. 24
33. UC-2395: E. C. Hammond, I. J. Selikoff and H. Seidman, "Asbestos Exposure, Cigarette Smoking and Death Rates" (1979)
34. Asbestos, February 1979, p. 46