Knowledge of Asbestos Hazards by Companies in the Asbestos Industry.

(These four companies are a small representation.)

Owens-Corning | W.R. Grace & Co.
Bendix Corp. | The Gypsum Association

Asbestos fibers have been used for thousands of years, but the modern asbestos industry truly came into being in the 1870s. Within just a few years, doctors began to notice that people who worked with asbestos were getting sick from exposure to asbestos dust. In 1897, a doctor in Vienna, Austria wrote about dust disease in asbestos weavers, and in 1906, Dr. Montague Murray, a British physician, reported to Parliament about a fatal case of asbestosis in an English factory. Asbestos hazards also were recognized in the United States in 1918 when a statistician with the Prudential Life Insurance Company reported Murray’s observations and cited Prudential’s own data that nine of 13 asbestos workers had died before age 45. The statistician blamed these deaths on the mining and "dressing" of asbestos which "unquestionably involve a considerable hazard."

As asbestos use became more widespread in the 1920s and 30s, medical knowledge about its health effects began to accumulate. In 1924, Dr. W.E. Cooke published a detailed case report about a female employee of Turner Brothers Asbestos who was disabled by asbestos by the age of 31. In 1928, the Journal of the American Medical Association commented on Murray’s and Cooke’s observations and stated, "Nevertheless, asbestosis, because of its dangers and its unique pathologic features, deserves more attention than it has had."

By 1930, cases of asbestosis in British industry had become so numerous that Drs. Merewether and Price of the Factory Department published a report finding that 25 percent of English asbestos workers who had worked five to nine years had asbestosis. They found that almost 81 percent of workers who had worked with asbestos for more than 20 years had the disease.

American companies began to take note of these findings. By 1930, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company began to study miners at Johns-Manville’s asbestos mine in Thetford, Quebec. While Metropolitan Life did find asbestosis in these workers, it never published the results, and to the contrary, reported in the medical journals that they did not find any cases of asbestosis. It wasn’t until 1944 that Metropolitan Life disclosed it had extensive experience studying asbestos.

Metropolitan Life also conducted medical examinations for Johns-Manville at its New Jersey plant and found that 29 percent of workers had asbestosis, including several whose only exposure to asbestos was being in the neighborhood of asbestos dust. In 1935, a further study of the asbestos industry by Metropolitan Life found that 53 percent of workers had asbestosis and another 31 percent had some signs of the disease by X-ray. Only 16 percent of asbestos workers had no disease at all.

In 1933, a British doctor noted cancer in a patient who had asbestosis and the following year described two cases of lung cancer in persons with asbestosis. By 1935, Drs Lynch and Smith in South Carolina were reporting cases of asbestosis and lung cancer in American workers they were studying. Many more cases of lung cancer in patients with asbestosis were reported through the 1940s in England, the United States and Germany.

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By 1943, asbestosis in combination with lung cancer was so extensive it was recognized under Germany’s workmen’s compensation laws. That same year, noted U.S. cancer researcher Dr. Wilhelm Hueper recognized the association between asbestosis and lung cancer. He stated, "Industry should make serious attempts to eliminate all potentially carcinogenic agents from further use by the development of suitable substitutes."

Many companies in the asbestos industry were aware of these findings. Since 1936, Dr. Leroy Gardner of the prestigious Saranac Laboratory in upstate New York had been studying the effects on mice of breathing asbestos dust. This research was performed through the sponsorship of several asbestos products companies who retained the right to edit or suppress the research. By 1943, Dr. Gardner had found that almost 82 percent of the mice had lung cancer after breathing asbestos dust for 15 to 24 months. He immediately informed Johns-Manville lawyer Vandiver Brown about the experiment’s results. Rather than publish the results of the study, the asbestos company sponsors deleted the mention of cancer from the report before its publication in 1951.

The Saranac Laboratory continued to do research for asbestos companies in the 1950s. Dr. Arthur Vorwald, Dr. Gardner’s successor at Saranac, proposed to several members of the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association a series of animal experiments to prove that asbestos was not associated with cancer. After 14 months of exposure to asbestos dust, mice were found to have a trend toward a greater incidence of cancerous tumors than mice not exposed to asbestos. This report was never published in the medical literature.

What follows are a few examples of corporate knowledge of the hazards of asbestos based upon documents obtained from asbestos manufacturers and others.


MORE INFORMATION
To learn more about corporate awareness about the hazards of asbestos read:
Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects, Fourth Edition, Barry I. Castleman, Aspen Law and Business (1996); and
Chronology of Asbestos Cancer Discoveries: Experimental Studies of the Saranac Laboratory, Gerritt W.H. Schepers, M.D. Sc.D., American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 27:593-606 (1995).