Protecting the workers: the medical board and the asbestos industry, 1930s-1960s

Our plain-English summary of Protecting the workers: the medical board and the asbestos industry, 1930s-1960s, by G. Tweedale, P. Hansen (Medical History, 1998).

The study

• Authors: G. Tweedale, P. Hansen
• Journal: Medical History
• Published: 1998;42(4):439-57
• Type of article: Historical article
• Cited by: 12 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher · Free full text

Summary of the article

This historical article examined how the government Medical Boards, set up in 1931 to screen and monitor British asbestos workers, performed between the 1930s and 1960s. It focused on their dealings with the leading UK asbestos firm, Turner & Newall. The authors drew on Turner & Newall company records microfilmed by Chase Manhattan Bank's lawyers during US litigation, together with official statistics, inquest reports and published literature. They described how the 1931 scheme excluded many workers through "scheduled areas" and other clauses, and how the industry resisted extending it. In its first year the Board recorded 32 cases of total disablement from 1,516 examinations. By 1940 it had suspended only 139 workers across the industry, 54 of them at Turner Brothers Asbestos, and X-rayed about one in ten workers at annual examinations. At least thirty Turner & Newall workers found at post-mortem to have had asbestosis had been passed as fit or certified with another disease. Between 1931 and 1948, 142 Turner & Newall workers were suspended, and 41 non-suspended workers died from asbestosis or its complications. From 1932 to 1940 only 15 asbestosis death certificates were issued industry-wide. The authors concluded that the Board's suspension policy was too conservative, contributed to underestimating asbestos risks, and that government medical officers shared some blame with the industry.

PubMed has no abstract for this study, and the article doesn't print one. We wrote this summary from the full article with the help of AI. It is not the authors' wording.

In plain English

This was a historical study based on company records, not a medical study of disease rates. The authors used Turner & Newall documents, microfilmed for Chase Manhattan Bank's US lawsuit, to examine how the UK government's Medical Boards, which examined asbestos workers, dealt with the industry, especially Turner & Newall, from the 1930s to the 1960s. In the scheme's first year, the Boards found 32 cases of total disablement from 1,516 examinations. By 1940 they had suspended 139 workers across the industry (54 at Turner Brothers Asbestos in Rochdale). Between 1931 and 1948, 142 Turner & Newall workers were suspended with asbestosis. Over the same period, 41 Turner & Newall workers who were never suspended died from asbestosis or its complications, a figure the authors called almost certainly an underestimate. From 1932 to 1940, only 15 asbestosis death certificates were issued industry-wide, plus a small but unknown number for asbestosis and tuberculosis. The authors described a very conservative diagnosis policy that favoured the industry. They concluded that the Medical Board failed to protect workers as well as it might.

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: Historical study based on archival documents (Turner & Newall records microfilmed by Chase Manhattan Bank during US litigation)
• Who was studied: The UK government Medical Boards (later Pneumoconiosis Medical Panels) and their dealings with the British asbestos industry, especially Turner & Newall and its subsidiary Turner Brothers Asbestos in Rochdale, 1930s to 1960s; illustrated with individual worker case files
• Exposure: Work in asbestos manufacture; the medical scheme covered 'scheduled areas' (crushing, carding, spinning, weaving and mattress-making). Fiber types are not specified.
• Main results:
  • In the first year of the scheme, the Medical Board found 32 cases of total disablement from 1,516 examinations across the asbestos industry
  • By 1940 the Medical Board had suspended only 139 workers in the entire asbestos industry, 54 of them at Turner Brothers Asbestos (TBA)
  • In the 1930s, only about one in ten workers were X-rayed at their annual examinations
  • At least thirty Turner & Newall 'scheduled' workers were shown at post-mortem to have had asbestosis, yet had been passed as fit to work, or certified with some other disease, by the Medical Board
  • Between 1931 and 1948, 142 Turner & Newall workers were suspended with asbestosis
  • By 1948, 41 non-suspended Turner & Newall workers had died from asbestosis or its complications, which the authors called almost certainly an underestimate
  • Between 1932 and 1940, only 15 asbestosis death certificates were issued for the whole industry, 8 of them at TBA
  • In addition to those 15, a small but unknown number of certificates were issued for asbestosis and tuberculosis
  • The Board suspended a worker whose lungs proved free of disease at post-mortem on only about three occasions at Turner & Newall, in several hundred cases. The authors read this as a very conservative diagnosis policy that favoured the industry.
  • Over about twenty years from 1932, at least 18 TBA employees were found at post-mortem to have had lung cancer, usually combined with asbestosis
  • Seven mesothelioma deaths among Turner & Newall workers between 1936 and 1960 could be identified with reasonable certainty
  • Until 1948, Turner & Newall paid out £15,690 for medical examinations and £57,476 in compensation
• The authors' conclusion: The authors concluded that the Medical Board failed to protect workers as well as it might. They held that although the asbestos industry bears primary responsibility, government medical officers must share some of the blame.
• Limitations the authors state:
  • The Board's own documentation and radiographic evidence apparently have not been preserved
  • Asbestos death counts are underestimates, because asbestosis can be misdiagnosed and is not always identified on death certificates
  • The reasons for the Medical Board's ineffectiveness remain to be explored in more detail

Topics

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

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Turner & Newall, Death Certificate.

Related studies

• The medical surveillance of asbestos workers — H.C. Lewinsohn (1972)
• A study of the mortality of female asbestos workers — M.L. Newhouse, G. Berry, et al. (1972)
• Industry influence on IAOH — T.K. Joshi (2008)
• A labor-management occupational health service in a construction industry — I.R. Tabershaw, W.C. Cooper, et al. (1970)
• Measurement of asbestos dust levels in British asbestos factories in the 1930s — N.J. Wikeley (1993)
• Double standards: the multinational asbestos industry and asbestos-related disease in South Africa — J. McCulloch, G. Tweedale (2004)

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