The long-lasting legacy of industrial carcinogens: the lesson of asbestos. Irving J. Selikoff Memorial Lecture, 1995

Our plain-English summary of The long-lasting legacy of industrial carcinogens: the lesson of asbestos. Irving J. Selikoff Memorial Lecture, 1995, by C. Maltoni (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1997).

The study

• Author: C. Maltoni
• Journal: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
• Published: 1997;837:570-86
• Cited by: 3 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This article is the text of the first Irving J. Selikoff Memorial Lecture, given in 1995. Much of it is the author's general discussion of cancer and industrial carcinogens. Its main original content was a series of Italian mesothelioma cases collected by the European Ramazzini Foundation. The series included 123 mesotheliomas among Italian workers exposed to asbestos used in railroads. These were identified by simply collecting cases, without any systematic inquiry, and their number rose year by year. For 47 of these cases, from the Emilia Romagna region, the latency period averaged 32.3 years (range 12 to 51). The series also included 11 sugar refinery workers, seven exposed at workplaces where their own jobs did not involve asbestos, seven exposed through relatives who worked with asbestos, six women exposed to asbestos-cement at home, and four people living in areas polluted with asbestos. The author wrote that the family cases were found through painstaking follow-up and believed such cases are underestimated. Asbestos fiber types were not named. The author concluded that industrial carcinogens may represent an 'unendingly bleak legacy.'

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: Memorial lecture (commentary) that includes a case series of mesothelioma. The railroad cases were gathered by collecting cases without systematic inquiry, and the family-exposure cases through follow-up of patient histories.
• Who was studied: Italian mesothelioma cases collected by the European Ramazzini Foundation's epidemiological unit. The largest group was 123 railroad-related cases; the others were sugar refinery workers in the Bologna area and people exposed outside their own jobs. Cases were diagnosed or died between the 1960s and 1995.
• Exposure: Asbestos (fiber type not specified). Sources were asbestos used in railroads, asbestos in sugar refinery plants, workplaces polluted with asbestos, contact with occupationally exposed family members, asbestos-cement in homes, and living near polluted sites.
• Main results:
  • 123 mesothelioma cases were identified among Italian workers exposed to asbestos used in railroads. Of these, 78 were Italian State Railways (FS) workers and 45 were not FS workers.
  • The occurrence of mesothelioma among the railroad-exposed workers increased year by year.
  • For the railroad cases from Emilia Romagna, the latency period averaged 32.3 years (range 12 to 51) in 47 cases, and age at death averaged 61.0 years in the 40 who had died.
  • 11 mesothelioma cases were identified among sugar refinery workers in the region (the table lists 10 pleural and 1 peritoneal).
  • Seven cases occurred in people whose jobs did not involve contact with asbestos but who worked in places polluted with it. The text calls them clerical workers; the table lists jobs such as post office clerk, barber, farmer and bank employee.
  • Seven cases followed family exposure to asbestos through relatives who worked with it (daughters, wives and a sister, all pleural).
  • All seven family-exposure cases were identified through painstaking follow-up of patient histories.
  • Six cases, all in women, followed prolonged exposure to asbestos in objects in the home, mostly asbestos-cement roofing.
  • Four cases occurred in people living in an area polluted with asbestos.
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that, from the lesson of asbestos, industrial carcinogens may represent an unendingly bleak legacy. The author also wrote that mesothelioma from family exposure is underestimated.
• Limitations the authors state:
  • The railroad cases were identified by simply collecting cases, without any systematic inquiry.
  • The author noted that studies of deaths based on medical charts and death certificates are unlikely to detect mesotheliomas caused by family contact.
  • The author noted that linking mesothelioma to environmental asbestos exposure is difficult without a careful inquiry.

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