Dust exposure and mortality in chrysotile mining, 1910-76

Our plain-English summary of Dust exposure and mortality in chrysotile mining, 1910-76, by M. Greenberg (Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 1994).

The study

• Author: M. Greenberg
• Journal: Occupational and Environmental Medicine
• Published: 1994;51(6):431
• Type of article: Comment, Letter
• Cited by: 2 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher · Free full text

In plain English

This item is a letter to the editor, not a research study, and it reports no new data. The author responded to the British Journal of Industrial Medicine's final issue, which reprinted the 1980 paper by Corbett McDonald and colleagues on Canadian chrysotile miners with an introduction. The author objected to the introduction's statement that McDonald and colleagues had faced a campaign of vituperation. The author called that statement, out of context, a form of bias, writing that mud was slung from both sides. The author recounted that in 1974 the author and Margaret Becklake agreed that the data collected by McDonald and by Irving Selikoff needed to be reviewed, and that a meeting between McDonald and Selikoff in Albany was planned but never took place. The author wrote that a historian's account of these battles, and of how the scientists' differences were exploited, remained to be written. Finally, the author disputed the introduction's statement that McDonald's work disproved the notion that a single fibre could cause cancer, writing that this was hardly a claim an epidemiologist would make and that it would be cited as fact.

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 to the editor (correspondence) commenting on a reprinted paper and its introduction; no new data
• Who was studied: No study population. The letter comments on the 1980 paper by Corbett McDonald et al on Canadian chrysotile miners, reprinted in the journal's Editor's Choice series.
• Main results:
  • The author argued that the introduction's unqualified statement that McDonald and colleagues were subjected to a campaign of vituperation was, out of context, a form of bias, and that mud was slung from both sides.
  • The author recounted that in 1974 it was apparent that the data collected by McDonald and by Selikoff needed to be reviewed to better understand asbestos dose responses, and that the author and Margaret Becklake agreed on this.
  • The author stated that a meeting between McDonald and Selikoff at a neutral site in Albany was planned to start collaboration but never took place.
  • In the letter's final paragraph, the author disputed the introduction's statement that McDonald's work had disproved the notion that a single fibre could cause cancer, and warned that it would be cited as fact.
• The authors' conclusion: The author wrote that a historian's account of the asbestos battles, and of how far the scientists' differences were exploited, remains to be written.

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Chrysotile.

Related studies

• Dust exposure and mortality in chrysotile mining, 1910-75 — J.C. McDonald, F.D. Liddell, et al. (1980)
• Exposure to chrysotile mining dust and digestive cancer mortality in a Chinese miner/miller cohort — S. Lin, X. Wang, et al. (2014)
• Dust exposure and mortality in chrysotile mining, 1910-75. 1980 — J.C. McDonald, F.D. Liddell, et al. (1993)
• Respiratory effects of exposure to dust in taconite mining and processing — T.C. Clark, V.A. Harrington, et al. (1980)
• The dust hazard in tremolite talc mining — L. Greenburg (1947)
• A retrospective cohort mortality study of males mining and milling attapulgite clay — R.J. Waxweiler, R.D. Zumwalde, et al. (1988)

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