Contextualising the policy decision to ban asbestos

Our plain-English summary of Contextualising the policy decision to ban asbestos, by B. Terracini (The Lancet. Planetary Health, 2019).

The study

• Author: B. Terracini
• Journal: The Lancet. Planetary Health
• Published: 2019;3(8):e331-e332
• Type of article: Comment
• Cited by: 3 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This is a commentary, not an original study. It accompanied a study by Ro-Ting Lin and colleagues, which the author said found that a country's odds of banning asbestos were associated with government efficiency and with ratifying the UN's Basel Convention and the International Labor Organization's C162 Asbestos Convention. Citing other sources, the author noted that more than 100 countries had not totally banned asbestos as of July 2019, and the USA never had. The author listed events preceding bans, including the 1977 IARC assessment that all forms of asbestos are carcinogenic. The author argued that a ban alone does not make a country asbestos-free, citing more than 30 million tons of asbestos-containing materials present in Italy at the time of its ban. Citing a survey, the author noted that 92 of 134 reports showing risk, and one of 11 that did not, declared no competing interests. The author concluded that pro-asbestos arguments disguised as science should be identified and rejected. The author disclosed serving as an expert witness for the Public Prosecution Office and the Court in asbestos trials.

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: Commentary (Comment) accompanying another article. It reports no original data.
• Who was studied: No population was studied. The commentary discusses national asbestos bans worldwide.
• Exposure: Asbestos in general, and asbestos-containing materials (ACMs). No individual fiber types were studied.
• Main results:
  • Citing the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat, the author stated that as of July 2019 more than 100 countries had not totally banned asbestos.
  • The author stated that no ban has ever been issued in the USA, and that the current OSHA workplace standard of 0.1 fibre per mL of air is close to the lowest level current methods can detect.
  • The author described the Lin and colleagues study (not this article) as finding that a country's odds of adopting a ban were associated with government efficiency and with ratification of the Basel Convention and ILO C162.
  • Among the events the author listed as preceding bans was the 1977 IARC assessment that all forms of asbestos are carcinogenic.
  • The author argued that a ban does not by itself create an asbestos-free country. As an example, the author cited more than 30 million tons of asbestos-containing materials present in Italy at the time of its ban, which still had to be made harmless.
  • Citing a survey by Valenzuela and colleagues (not this article), the author reported that authors declared no competing interests in 92 of 134 reports showing evidence of risk, and in one of 11 reports that did not.
  • The author disclosed having served as an expert witness for the Public Prosecution Office and for the Court in asbestos trials.
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that the factors shaping decisions on banning asbestos are complex, and that pro-asbestos arguments disguised as science or scientific doubt should be identified and rejected.

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