Records of the Australian Mesothelioma Surveillance Program have been lost!

Our plain-English summary of Records of the Australian Mesothelioma Surveillance Program have been lost!, by M. Hendrickx (The Medical Journal of Australia, 2008).

The study

• Author: M. Hendrickx
• Journal: The Medical Journal of Australia
• Published: 2008;188(9):552; author reply 552
• Type of article: Letter
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This is a letter to the editor with a reply, not a research study. The author, a geologist and PhD candidate, reported written advice from the Australian Safety and Compensation Council that the records of the Australian Mesothelioma Surveillance Program (AMSP) had been lost. According to the letter, the AMSP ran from 1980 to 1985, and its records held full occupational and environmental histories of about 1000 mesothelioma cases reported in the early 1980s. The author had hoped to use them in doctoral research on naturally occurring asbestos and mesothelioma risk in Australia. The author wrote that data from the Australian Mesothelioma Register, which replaced the AMSP in 1985, are not detailed enough for this. The author wrote that permanent loss of the records would be a great loss to mesothelioma research in Australia. In reply, a Council director stated that the records went into storage in 2001, that searches over several months in 2007 failed to find them, and that efforts to locate them continued.

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, followed by a reply (comment) from the Australian Safety and Compensation Council; no research data
• Who was studied: No study population. The letter concerns the records of the Australian Mesothelioma Surveillance Program (1980 to 1985), which held histories of about 1000 mesothelioma cases reported in the early 1980s
• Exposure: No exposure was studied. The author's planned doctoral research concerned naturally occurring asbestos and mesothelioma risk in Australia
• Main results:
  • The author reported that the records of the AMSP had been lost, according to written advice from the Australian Safety and Compensation Council
  • The letter states that the AMSP ran between 1980 and 1985
  • The author stated that the Australian Mesothelioma Register succeeded the AMSP in 1985 and has not repeated the AMSP's level of detail
  • The author stated that data from the Australian Mesothelioma Register are not detailed enough for the planned research
  • The reply stated that the AMSP records went into storage in 2001, when the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission relocated from Sydney to Canberra
  • The reply stated that the Council searched for the records over several months in 2007
  • The reply stated that the Council was still trying to locate the records
• The authors' conclusion: The author wrote that permanent loss of the records would be a great loss to mesothelioma research in Australia

Topics

The National Library of Medicine indexes this study under subjects our site covers: Lung cancer, Mesothelioma.

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

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