What's wrong with the environment?

Our plain-English summary of What's wrong with the environment?, by R.J. Benoit (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1987).

The study

• Author: R.J. Benoit
• Journal: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
• Published: 1987;502:1-20
• Type of article: Review
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher
• In J-M's library: Johns-Manville's company medical library held a copy (J-M no. 004715).

In plain English

This article was an essay, not a research study. The author discussed three environmental case histories (acid rain, asbestos and polychlorobiphenyls, or PCBs) as examples of public decision-making, then discussed risk assessment and public attitudes to risk. The asbestos section drew on earlier reports. It cited a 1968 study by Selikoff for the figure that a smoker with occupational asbestos exposure had 92 times the likelihood of lung cancer of a nonsmoker without occupational asbestos exposure. The author drew a graph from Table 5 of a Stanford Research Institute report on respiratory cancer (lung, larynx and pleural mesothelioma) in retired asbestos workers. The author described the relationship as quite remarkably linear and said the data showed no evidence of a threshold exposure, while noting that the line was only sketched in. The author quoted a 1974 EPA statement that no safe level had been identified. The author also gave the opinion that evidence that swallowing asbestos causes disease was too weak to take seriously. The author concluded that the link with cancer ruled out sensible risk analysis for asbestos.

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: essay/commentary on environmental decision-making using three case histories (acid rain, asbestos, PCBs); not original research
• Who was studied: No study population of its own; the asbestos graph used published data on retired asbestos workers from a Stanford Research Institute report
• Exposure: Asbestos in general, described as a number of different fibrous siliceous minerals; no specific fiber types named. The graph's dose was exposed-time weighted dustiness of workplace air
• Main results:
  • Citing Selikoff's 1968 study (not this article's own data): a smoker with occupational asbestos exposure had 92 times the likelihood of lung cancer of a nonsmoker with no occupational asbestos exposure
  • In the author's graph of Stanford Research Institute data on respiratory cancer (lung, larynx, pleural mesothelioma) in retired asbestos workers, the author described the dose-response relationship as linear
  • The author stated that these data showed no evidence of a threshold exposure for the cancer response
  • The author quoted the EPA's 1974 conclusion that no safe level of asbestos in air had been identified
  • The author's opinion: evidence that oral ingestion of asbestos causes any disease was too weak to take seriously
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that the asbestos problem seemed to be one of fugitive asbestos at some reasonably high level, but that the link with cancer ruled out any feasibility of sensible risk analysis
• Limitations the authors state:
  • The author noted that the line in the dose-response graph was only sketched in

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Browse more research in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, or return to medical research.