In reply: asbestos, carcinogenicity, and public policy

Our plain-English summary of In reply: asbestos, carcinogenicity, and public policy, by S.W. Samuels (Science, 1990).

The study

• Author: S.W. Samuels
• Journal: Science
• Published: 1990;248(4957):795-6
• Cited by: 2 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher
• In J-M's library: Johns-Manville's company medical library held a copy (J-M no. 003817).

In plain English

This item is a letter to the editor in Science, not a research study. The supplied text is a scanned page of the Science letters section. Most of the page holds two other letters. One concerns the job of director of the National Institutes of Health. The other is by Arnold R. Brody and responds to an article by Brooke Mossman and colleagues on asbestos and public policy. Only the page's last lines appear to begin a further letter. That fragment carries no author's name, so it cannot be confirmed as the cited letter by S. W. Samuels, and the fragment itself contains no research data. The fragment said there may have been good reason not to tell readers of the long-term asbestos industry associations of at least four of the five authors of the Mossman article, which it called polemical. It said that article advised that the industry not be required to remove asbestos from schools and public, where the text breaks off mid-sentence. The rest of the letter and any conclusion are missing.

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); only an unsigned opening fragment is present
• Exposure: Not a study. The fragment concerns the authors of the Mossman et al. article and their advice on removal of asbestos from schools and public buildings (text cut off).

Related studies

• In reply: asbestos, carcinogenicity, and public policy — W.J. Nicholson, E.M. Johnson, et al. (1990)
• In reply: asbestos, carcinogenicity, and public policy — B.T. Mossman, J. Bignon (1990)
• In reply: asbestos, carcinogenicity, and public policy — K.S. Crump (1990)
• Reply to letter by Nolan and colleagues--re: the carcinogenicity of New York state talc dusts in humans — M. Finkelstein (2013)
• Asbestos: scientific developments and implications for public policy — B.T. Mossman, J. Bignon, et al. (1990)
• Naturally occurring asbestos: a recurring public policy challenge — R.J. Lee, B.R. Strohmeier, et al. (2008)

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