Industry responsibility for the use of its products

Our plain-English summary of Industry responsibility for the use of its products, by P. Kotin (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1979).

The study

• Author: P. Kotin
• Journal: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
• Published: 1979;330:503-5
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher
• In J-M's library: Johns-Manville's company medical library held a copy (J-M no. 003983).

In plain English

This article was a commentary, not a research study, and presented no new data. The author, from the Johns-Manville Corporation, gave it at a meeting where others had reviewed asbestos disease data. The author stated that past occupational asbestos exposure had been associated with asbestosis and increased risk of mesothelioma and bronchogenic (lung) cancer in a segment of exposed workers. The author adopted William Lowrance's definition: a thing is safe if its risks are judged acceptable. Among other points, the author argued that asbestos fibers that are not inhaled cannot cause disease and that product labeling for safe use should be mandatory. The author called it advisable to stop selling asbestos fiber in several markets where the end product does not lock in the fibers or dusty end uses cannot practically be controlled, and questioned individual home use. Management, the author said, owed obligations to employees injured in the past and must generate no new cases of disease. The author concluded that keeping asbestos in commerce requires it to be safe in this sense, and that responsible use can make this possible.

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 / conference talk (opinion piece); no original data
• Exposure: Asbestos in general (no fiber type specified), considered across mining, milling, manufacture, distribution, use, waste disposal and demolition
• Main results:
  • The author stated (not a finding of this article) that past occupational asbestos exposure has been associated with asbestosis and increased risk of mesothelioma and bronchogenic cancer in a segment of exposed workers
  • The author adopted William Lowrance's definition of safety as acceptability of risk
  • The author argued that asbestos fibers that are not inhaled are not hazardous
  • The author argued that labeling directions for safe use of asbestos products should be mandatory
  • The author stated that it had become advisable to discontinue selling asbestos fiber in several markets: those where the end product does not lock in the fibers, or where controlling end uses that create asbestos-containing dusts is impractical
  • The author questioned whether individual home use of asbestos was acceptable
  • The author argued that management has an obligation to employees injured by past exposures and to fund research to ameliorate past deficiencies
  • The author argued that management must take responsibility for generating no new cases of disease
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that keeping asbestos in commerce requires it to be safe, as Lowrance defines the term, and that responsible use can make this possible

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• The Production of Corporate Research to Manufacture Doubt About the Health Hazards of Products: An Overview of the Exponent Bakelite® Simulation Study — D. Egilman (2018)
• Work environment of plants manufacturing asbestos-containing products in Japan — T. Higashi, H. Hori, et al. (1994)

Browse more research in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, or return to medical research.