Standards for asbestos exposure

Our plain-English summary of Standards for asbestos exposure, by N. Stack (Lancet, 1983).

The study

• Author: N. Stack
• Journal: Lancet
• Published: 1983;2(8364):1424
• Type of article: Letter
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This item was a short letter to the editor of The Lancet, not a research study, and it reported no data. It was written by the Director General of the Asbestos International Association in London. It replied to a Lancet 'Round the World' report (Dec 3, p 1298) on the US emergency standard for asbestos exposure. That report had said that attempts to modify current health standards had been resisted by industry, and the author wrote that this was not true. According to the author, the US asbestos industry had for some years been trying, through the Asbestos Information Association of North America, to persuade the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to hold public hearings on whether a revised standard was needed. The author wrote that the Administration had taken no action and then suddenly imposed an emergency temporary standard. The author argued that this standard implied an extreme danger to the workforce in need of an urgent remedy, and called that quite at variance with the facts. The author also stated that US courts had since suspended the standard pending further evidence. The letter named no fiber types or diseases.

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) giving the author's views; not a research study
• Exposure: The US emergency temporary standard for asbestos exposure imposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; no fiber types, products, jobs or doses are given
• Main results:
  • The author disputed the earlier report's statement that industry had resisted attempts to modify health standards
  • The author stated that the US asbestos industry, through the Asbestos Information Association of North America (AIA/NA), had for some years been trying to persuade the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to hold public hearings on whether a revised standard was needed
  • The author stated that the Administration took no action and then suddenly imposed an emergency temporary standard
  • The author stated that US courts subsequently suspended the emergency temporary standard pending further evidence
• The authors' conclusion: The author's view was that the emergency temporary standard implied an extreme danger to the workforce needing an urgent remedy, and that this was quite at variance with the facts

Topics

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

Related studies

• Silicosis among foundry workers. Implication for the need to revise the OSHA standard — K.D. Rosenman, M.J. Reilly, et al. (1996)
• The hygiene standard for chrysotile asbestos — J. Peto (1978)
• Global corporate policies and international "double standards" in occupational and environmental health — B. Castleman (1999)
• Revising the British Occupational Hygiene Society asbestos standard: 1968-1982 — M. Greenberg (2006)
• Hygiene standards for asbestos — S.A. Roach (1970)
• Technological feasibility of the 2 fibers/cc asbestos standard in asbestos textile facilities — R.A. Curtis, P.H. Bierbaum (1975)

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