Past asbestos exposure levels in foundries and cement-asbestos factories

Our plain-English summary of Past asbestos exposure levels in foundries and cement-asbestos factories, by S. Mattioli, D. Nini, G. Mancini, et al (American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 2002).

The study

• Authors: S. Mattioli, D. Nini, G. Mancini, F.S. Violante
• Journal: American Journal of Industrial Medicine
• Published: 2002;42(4):363
• Type of article: Letter, Comment
• Cited by: 1 article, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This is a letter to the editor, not a research study, and it reports no measured exposure levels. The authors responded to a 1998 Michigan report by Rosenman and Reilly, in which 54 of 115 patients reclassified as having asbestos-related X-ray changes were past foundry workers. The authors wrote that the situation seemed similar in Italy, where asbestos was widely used in local foundries for gloves, aprons, insulation and curtains. As an example, they described a man examined because of a worker's claim. The man had worked in a foundry for 30 years (1962 to 1992), had complained of cough since 1990, and had asbestosis on a 1993 X-ray. They also revisited a 1989 urine-fiber study by Guillemin and colleagues of cement-asbestos workers exposed to low levels of chrysotile. That study used foundry workers as the unexposed controls and could not show with sufficient statistical confidence that the exposed workers excreted more fibers. The authors suggested that study may now be read as indicating that foundry workers of that time had exposure levels not significantly different from those of cement-asbestos workers.

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 commenting on earlier published studies and mentioning one case the authors examined; not an original study
• Who was studied: One man the authors examined in Italy because of a worker's claim, who had worked in a foundry for 30 years between 1962 and 1992. The letter also discusses foundry workers described in earlier studies.
• Exposure: Asbestos used in Italian foundries for gloves, aprons, insulations and curtains, according to the authors. The 1989 study they discuss involved cement-asbestos workers exposed to low levels of chrysotile. No exposure measurements are given in the letter.
• Main results:
  • In the case the authors examined, the foundry worker had complained of cough since 1990, and an X-ray in 1993 revealed asbestosis.
  • Attributed to an earlier study (Rosenman and Reilly, 1998), not this letter: in Michigan from 1985 to 1996, 115 patients were reclassified as having asbestos-related X-ray changes, and 54 of the 115 were past foundry workers.
  • Attributed to an earlier study (Guillemin et al., 1989), not this letter: in a study of urinary asbestos fibers in cement-asbestos factory workers, with foundry workers as controls, that study's authors did not find with sufficient statistical confidence that exposed workers excreted more fibers in urine than the foundry worker controls.
• The authors' conclusion: The authors suggested the 1989 urinary fiber study may now be interpreted as indicating that foundry workers employed around that time had asbestos exposure levels not significantly dissimilar to those of cement-asbestos factory workers. They also wrote that the association between foundry work and asbestosis may be rather widespread.

Topics

The National Library of Medicine indexes this study under subjects our site covers: Asbestosis.

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

Related studies

• Cancer morbidity and quartz exposure in Swedish iron foundries — H. Westberg, L. Andersson, et al. (2013)
• Asbestos-related x-ray changes in foundry workers — K.D. Rosenman, M.J. Reilly (1998)
• Silicosis among foundry workers. Implication for the need to revise the OSHA standard — K.D. Rosenman, M.J. Reilly, et al. (1996)
• Measurement of asbestos dust levels in British asbestos factories in the 1930s — N.J. Wikeley (1993)
• Asbestos fibre burden in the lungs of patients with mesothelioma who lived near asbestos-cement factories — P.G. Barbieri, D. Mirabelli, et al. (2012)
• Trends in Airborne Chrysotile Asbestos Fibre Concentrations in Asbestos Cement Manufacturing Factories in Zimbabwe from 1996 to 2016 — B. Mutetwa, D. Moyo, et al. (2021)

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