Asbestos exposure during home renovation in New South Wales

Our plain-English summary of Asbestos exposure during home renovation in New South Wales, by A.R. Johnson, D.H. Yates (The Medical Journal of Australia, 2014).

The study

• Authors: A.R. Johnson, D.H. Yates
• Journal: The Medical Journal of Australia
• Published: 2014;200(6):315
• Type of article: Letter, Comment
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This item is a letter in the Medical Journal of Australia. In it, two thoracic physicians who wrote an earlier article on asbestos exposure during home renovation in New South Wales replied to criticism from Lemen and colleagues. It reported no new research data. The critics' letter, printed alongside, objected that the earlier article had called the risk of disease from chrysotile asbestos "still controversial" and had cited work by Bernstein and colleagues. In reply, the authors said they had not written that the risk of disease from chrysotile was controversial. Rather, they had written that no threshold for exposure to chrysotile had been identified in recent World Health Organization reports, although this issue was still controversial. They said the Bernstein reference was not in their original manuscript but was requested by a peer reviewer. They defended the right of authors to quote peer-reviewed papers to present the spectrum of opinion. They said the chrysotile debate and other researchers' funding were outside their paper's focus. Citing a dictionary definition, the authors concluded that the word "controversial" was appropriately used.

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.

What the study did and found

• Design: Letter (reply to correspondence); no new data
• Exposure: No exposure was studied. The correspondence concerned the treatment of chrysotile asbestos in the authors' earlier article on asbestos exposure during home renovation in Australia.
• Main results:
  • The authors stated they had not written that the risk of disease from chrysotile is still controversial. They had written that no threshold for exposure had been identified for chrysotile in recent World Health Organization reports, although this issue is still controversial.
  • The authors stated that the Bernstein and colleagues reference was not in their original manuscript but was requested by a reviewer.
  • The authors defended the right of authors to quote peer-reviewed papers to present the spectrum of opinion, and the right of reviewers to suggest this.
• The authors' conclusion: Citing the dictionary definition of "controversial" as "forming an object of debate, disputed", the authors concluded that the word was appropriately used.

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Asbestos Exposure.

Related studies

• Asbestos exposure during home renovation in New South Wales — E.K. Park, D.H. Yates, et al. (2013)
• Asbestos exposure during home renovation in New South Wales — R.A. Lemen, A.L. Frank, et al. (2014)
• Increasing incidence of malignant mesothelioma after exposure to asbestos during home maintenance and renovation — N.J. Olsen, P.J. Franklin, et al. (2011)
• Medicolegal aspects of the third wave of asbestos-related disease in Australia — J.R. Gordon, J. Leigh (2011)
• Renovation and renewal — A. Katelaris (2011)
• A study of fibrous aerosols in the home environment in Sosnowiec, Poland — J.S. Pastuszka, A. Kabala-Dzik, et al. (1999)

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