All this information
was obtained from the Ontario Ministry of Labour web sight athttp://www.gov.on.ca/LAB/ohs/ohse.htm
Mesothelioma
prior
to diagnosis. Therefore, it can be difficult to trace when and where theexposure
to asbestos occurred.
This information
came from http://www.flipside.org/vol2/feb99/99fe15a.htm
FORMER
SARNIA CHEMICAL WORKERS 'DROPPING LIKE FLIES'
“Clare Hall,
a former worker at Holmes' foundry operation, recalls in the early 1970s
that when new chemicals were
brought into
the plant, the pigeons that used to roost there began dying.
‘They'd hit
the floor. Sometimes they'd kick their feet but they'd be dead,’ he said.
v The foundry used silica, and
powerful chemicals
like isocyanates and triethylamine.
Mr. Hall suffers
from heart disease, and he's worried because three friends who used to
work at Holmes, all in their
50s, have
recently died. Two died from heart attacks and one from cancer. “
Saturday,
February 13, 1999 MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT The Globe and Mail
http://www.globeandmail.com/gam/Health/19990213/UCANCM.html
The
Asbestos Tragedy
by
Paul
Brodeur
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=U.S+National+Institute+of+Occupational+Health+Paul+OR+Brodeur&btnG=Google+Search
Back
in the nineteen?twenties, when the word "ASBESTOS" frequently
appeared
in large block letters on the fireproof drop curtains that
closed
off the proscenium openings of theatre stages, it was
customary
for youngsters attending Saturday?matinee performances of
"Charley's
Aunt" or "The Vagabond King" or "Mrs. Wiggs of the
Cabbage
Patch" to greet the raising of the asbestos curtain with the
chant
"All school boys eat stewed tomatoes on Saturday!" This was
not,
of course, an exercise in mnemonics but an expression of
youthful
exuberance, and, to a lesser extent, perhaps, a reflection
of
the tendency in an era celebrated for parochialism and flippancy
to
dismiss strange and exotic substances with jokes. Among older
people,
it was certainly common knowledge that asbestos was
non?combustible,
for when "Joe and Asbestos"?the syndicated comic
strip
about horse racing?first appeared in the Baltimore Sun, in
1925,
the stableboy named Asbestos explained to the readership that
he
had acquired his odd moniker because "no matter how hot my tips
are,
they'll never burn a hole in your pocketbook." Such knowledge
was
hardly universal, however, for it was also true that a popular
put?on
of the flapper age consisted of solemnly assuming a
susceptible
theatre companion that the funny?looking word on the
curtain
meant "Welcome" in Latin. The fact of the matter is that
although
asbestos was linked one way or another in the public mind
with
fireproof theatre curtains, many people thought its name was a
trademark,
few people knew that it was being utilized in a wide
variety
of industrial products, only a handful of medical
researchers
were just then beginning to suspect that it was
affecting
the health of the workers who handled it, and virtually no
one
had any idea that it would one day prove to be one of the most
important
industrial causes of cancer in the world.
Asbestos,
which comes from a Greek word meaning inextinguishable or
unquenchable,
is a broad term embracing a number of fibrous silicate
Although
known to mankind as early as the Stone Age, when it was
used
in pottery, asbestos was considered a novelty until the late
1870s,
when it began to be mined on a commerical basis. It soon
achieved
enormous industrial importance because of its unique and
astonishing
physical properties.
Weaver
JM Textile Division circa 1934
Asbestos
appears to be highly combustible, yet it can withstand the
fiercest
heat. It seems as perishable as grass, but by virtue of
being
almost immune to the forces of corrosion and decay under
almost
every condition of temperature and moisture (and of being
resistant
as well to the action of most acids, alkalies, and other
chemicals)
it is just about indestructible. It looks extremely
fragile,
yet its fibers have a tensile strength equal to that of
piano
wire. Apparently as light and feathery as thistle or
eiderdown,
it is actually as heavy and dense as the rock from which
it
is extracted. In one sense, then, it is a fiber of stone. In
another
sense, however, it is a mineralogical vegetable whose fibers
are
so soft and flexible that they can be carded, spun, and woven as
easily
as fibers of cotton or flax.
Spoolers
JM Textile Division circa 1940s
Asbestos
is the only mineral that can be woven into cloth, and its
fibrous
structure is, if anything, even more amazing than its
remarkable
ability to withstand heat. In fact, if it were not for
the
electron microscope, the extent to which asbestos is fibrous
would
be difficult to believe, for there are approximately a million
individual
fibrils lying side by side in a linear inch of chrysotile
asbestos?a
variety of the mineral that accounts for 95% of the
world's
production?whereas only 3,800 glass fibrils, such as those
found
in various insulation materials, or 630 human hairs can be
aligned
along the same distance. Moreover, in addition to their
extreme
fineness, high tensile strength, and unusual flexibility,
spinnability,
and resistance to heat and the elements, asbestos
fibers
possess great powers to adsorb and to filter. Small wonder,
then,
that when asbestos, which had been known to the ancients as
"the
magic mineral," was, in effect, rediscovered a little more than
a
century ago in the age of industrial expansion, it was put to
JM
Salesman's Chrysotile Asbestos Insulation Samples
During
this century, the demand for asbestos rose almost as fast as
the
stuff could be mined from the earth and milled from its host
rock.
In 1879, when the world's first commercial asbestos mine was
opened
at Thetford, in the Province of Quebec, only 300 tons of the
mineral
was produced. By 1910, annual world production had jumped to
30,000
tons; by the middle thirties, it had increased to 500,000
tons;
and by 1970 the total output was more than four million tons a
year.
For several decades, asbestos was called "the mineral of a
thousand
uses" by those who sold it, but by the late 1960s this
label
had become obsolete, especially in the United States, where it
is
estimated that asbestos may have as many as 3,000 different
industrial
applications. As a result, asbestos has become
practically
ubiquitous in modem society. There is not an automobile,
airplane,
train, ship, missile, or engine of any sort that does not
contain
asbestos in some form or another, and it has found its way
into
almost every building, factory, home, and farm across the land.
And,
because its minuscule fibers are eminently respirable, asbestos
has
also found its way into the lungs of human beings, where, by
remaining
as indestructible as it does in nature, it can wreak
terrible
havoc.
Life
Magazine Ad circa 1940s
The
adverse biological effects of asbestos were observed as early as
the
first century by the Greek geographer Strabo and by the Roman
naturalist
Pliny the Elder, both of whom mentioned in passing a
sickness
in the lungs of slaves whose occupation was to weave
asbestos
into cloth. Strabo and Pliny were calling attention for the
first
time in history to a disease that would one day be known as
asbestosis?a
form of pneumoconiosis (the general term for all dust
diseases
of the lung) caused by the inhalation of the fine fibers
and
particles of asbestos. The use of asbestos in Europe appears to
have
diminished greatly during the Medieval period, but with the
advent
of the industrial revolution, asbestos came into widespread
use.
As a result, the fact that the magic mineral could produce lung
disease,
which had been forgotten since Strabo and Pliny first
recorded
it around the time of Christ, soon manifested itself again.
postmortem
examination was performed by Dr. H. Montague Murray, a
physician
in London's Charing Cross Hospital, on the body of a
33?year?old
man who had worked for 14 years in an asbestos?textile
factory.
The patient, found to have been suffering from severe
pulmonary
fibrosis, which is scarring of the lungs, had been the
last
survivor of a group of ten men who were working in the carding
room
of the factory in 1886, and since Dr. Murray found spicules of
asbestos
in the lung tissues at autopsy, he was able to establish a
presumptive
connection between the man's occupation and the disease
that
killed him.
It
was not until 1924 that the first clear case of death due to
asbestosis
appeared in medical literature. That year, Dr. W. E.
Cooke,
an English physician, who gave the disease its name,
performed
a postmortem examination on a 33?year?old woman patient
who
had started working at the age of thirteen in an
asbestos?textile
factory. By 1917, after thirteen years of exposure,
she
had been coughing and in bad health. The autopsy showed
extensive
lung scarring and dense strands of abnormal fibrous tissue
connecting
the lungs and the pleural membranes surrounding them.
Cooke's
discovery, which was published in the British Medical
Journal,
was the point of departure for an intensive study of
asbestosis
in Britain over the next seven years. Here 'In the United
States,
no investigations of the health experience of asbestos
workers
were undertaken by the United States Public Health Service.
As
early as 1918, however, the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
published
a report by Frederick L. Hoffmann, a consulting
statistician
for the Prudential Insurance Company of America, who
not
only called attention to the fact that American asbestos workers
were
experiencing unusually early deaths, but also revealed that it
had
become the practice of some American and Canadian insurance
companies
not to issue life?insurance policies to asbestos workers,
because
of the "assumed health?injurious conditions" that existed in
the
asbestos industry.
By
the early 1930s, asbestos workers who had developed asbestosis
were
bringing damage suits against Johns?Manville, of New York City,
the
largest asbestos manufacturer in the nation, and against
Raybestos?Manhattan,
of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the second largest
asbestos
company. As a result, the two firms, together with other
leading
asbestos manufacturers, initiated a cover?up of the asbestos
hazard
that continued for more than forty years. Here are some of
the
highlights of that cover?up:
In
1933, Lewis Herold Brown, the president of Johns?Manville,
advised
the company's board of directors that eleven pending
lawsuits
brought by employees who had developed asbestosis while
working
at the company's plant in Manville, New Jersey, could be
settled
out of court, provided that the attorney for the plaintiffs
could
be persuaded not to bring any more cases against the company.
Lewis
H. Brown, President of Johns?Manville 1933
In
1934, Vandiver Brown, the head of the Johns?Manville's legal
department,
persuaded Dr. Anthony Lanza, a physician at the
Metropolitan
Life Insurance Company, to delete unfavorable
information
from a report about disease among asbestos workers that
was
soon to be published by the U.S. Public Health Service.
In
1935, Sumner Simpson, the president of Raybestos?Manhattan, wrote
Vandiver
Brown a letter, telling him that "I think the less said
about
asbestos the better off we are," to which Brown replied, "I
quite
agree with you that our interests are best served by having
asbestosis
receive the minimum of publicity."
In
1936, Vandiver Brown and Sumner Simpson, together with officials
of
several other asbestos manufacturing companies, arrange to
finance
animal experiments at the Trudeau Foundation's Saranac
Laboratory,
at Saranac Lake, New York, in order to gather data that
they
expected would help the asbestos industry defend against claims
brought
by workers who had developed asbestosis. The studies showed,
however,
that significant numbers of animals developed asbestosis
after
being allowed to inhale asbestos. These results were
suppressed
by the asbestos manufacturers for more than forty years.
In
1943, Vandiver Brown told representatives of the Union Asbestos &
Rubber
Company, Paterson, New Jersey, that Johns?Manville did not
inform
its employees when their chest X?rays showed that they had
developed
asbestos disease. Brown said that if the workers were
told,
they would stop working or file claims against Johns?Manville,
and
that it was company policy to let them work until they quit
because
of asbestosis, or die as a result of it.
In
1949, Dr. Kenneth Smith, who would subsequently become the
medical
director of Johns?Manville, sent a memorandum to company
showed
signs of early asbestosis. The memo, which did not come to
light
until 1976, provided written evidence that Johns?Manville was
following
a policy of not informing its workers when they developed
the
disease.
"But
as long as the man is not disabled it is felt that he should
not
be told of his condition so that he can live and work in peace
and
the company can benefit by his many years of experience."
In
1952, the Seventh Saranac Symposium a week?long meeting on
pulmonary
dust disease?was held at the Saranac Laboratory. It was
attended
by more than two hundred medical doctors, research
scientists,
state and federal public health officials, insurance
executives,
and asbestos manufacturers, who were told about medical
evidence
implicating asbestos as a potent lung?cancer producing
agent.
Unlike the proceedings of six previous symposia, the
proceedings
of this meeting were never published. And because only
one
or two of the participants spoke out about what they had heard,
almost
no information about the carcinogenicity of asbestos found
its
way into the press for another decade.
The
result of the pervasive cover?up of the asbestos disease hazard
was
a national public health disaster of unparalleled magnitude,
which
is unfolding to this very day. Some twenty million
unsuspecting
American workers?four and a half million men and women
in
the wartime shipyards alone?underwent exposure to dangerously
high
levels of asbestos dust as they applied, or worked near people
who
were applying, asbestos insulation to boilers and
high?temperature
pipes in ships, power plants, oil refineries, and
chemical
factories; as they sprayed asbestos insulation on the steel
girders
of high?rise buildings, or worked at trades in close
proximity
to such operations; and as they toiled in mines from which
raw
asbestos was extracted, and in factories where asbestos products
were
manufactured. Hundreds of thousands of these people have either
developed
or will develop incurable asbestos disease. Tens of
thousands
of them have died of it.
The
asbestos cover?up might have gone on indefinitely had it not
been
for two extraordinary developments during the early and middle
1960s?one
in law and the other in medicine?which would ultimately
making
them accountable to some of their many victims. The legal
development
occurred in 1965, when the American Law Foundation
defined
tort law to make the sellers of all unreasonably dangerous
products
strictly liable to users and consumers unless their
products
carried adequate warning labels. The medical development
consisted
of some pioneering epidemiological studies of the health
and
mortality experience of asbestos insulation workers which had
been
conducted during 1962 and 1963 by Dr. Irving J. Selikoff,
director
of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Environmental
Sciences
Laboratory, in New York City; Dr. Jacob Churg, chief
pathologist
at Banert Memorial Hospital, in Paterson, New Jersey;
and
Dr. E. Cuyler Hammond, vice?president for epidemiology and
statistics
of the American Cancer Society.
Dr.
Selikoff gave X?ray examinations, pulmonary function tests, and
blood
tests to 1, 1 17 asbestos insulation workers who were members
of
New York Local 12 and Newark Local 32 of the International
Association
of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers. He
found
radiological evidence of asbestosis in fully half of these
men.
Moreover, he found that among 392 men with more than twenty
years
of exposure, 339 (slightly less than 87%) had developed the
disease.
Even more alaring were the results of a carefully conducted
mortality
study of 632 workers who were on the union rolls at the
two
locals as of December 31, 1942. According to the standard
mortality
tables, 203 deaths could have been expected among the 632
workers.
Instead, there were 255, not counting seven men who had
died
before incurring twenty years of exposure?an excess of 25 %.
The
reason for the excess was not hard to find: these men had
succumbed
to lung cancer at seven times the expected rate, and to
gastrointestinal
cancer at three times the expected rate.
Dr.
Irving J. Selikoff in his Mt Sinai office 1990
The
studies of Dr. Selikoff and his associates furnished
incontrovertible
evidence that industrial exposure to asbestos was
extremely
hazardous, and they marked a turning point in the views
held
by doctors and health officials in many parts of the world.
Unfortunately,
state and federal health officials in the United
States
were lamentably slow in reacting to the studies of Selikoff
and
his colleagues. Indeed, in some cases they were clearly
reluctant
to take any action at all. During the 1960s, the chief
of
Occupational Health entered into confidentiality agreements with
asbestos
manufacturers that prevented him from giving out any
details
concerning the asbestos exposure of any of the workers
employed
at the asbestos factories his division was inspecting. As a
result,
the Public Health Service did not make any recommendations
to
asbestos workers or to their unions about how workers might
protect
themselves from the hazard of toiling in excessive dust
levels.
For its part, the U.S. Department of Labor merely saw fit to
reduce
its ludicrously inadequate and almost totally unenforced
standard
for occupational exposure to asbestos from one that allowed
workers
to inhale tens of billions of asbestos fibers and fibrils
each
day, to one that allowed them to inhale hundreds of millions of
fibers
and fibrils each day. As for the Environmental Protection
Agency
and its predecessors, these organizations allowed asbestos
insulation
to be sprayed on the steel girders of high?rise buildings
until
1972, when this extremely hazardous practice was banned
nationwide,
and to be used in the construction of thousands of
schools,
offices, and apartment buildings across the United States.
By
this time, asbestos?insulation workers were bringing
product?liability
lawsuits against the manufacturers of asbestos
insulation,
who had failed to attach labels to their products
warning
that asbestos could cause disease. As might be expected, the
studies
of Dr. Selikoff and his associates were of considerable
importance
in helping these plaintiffs establish the health hazard
of
asbestos. Equally important was the determination of Ward
Stephenson,
a trial lawyer from Orange, Texas, who won the first
asbestos
product?liability lawsuit, in 1971. This landmark verdict
was
upheld by a federal court of appeals in 1973, and it paved the
way
for the greatest toxic tort litigation in the history of
American
jurisprudence.
During
the next ten years, Johns?Manville, Raybestos?Manhattan, and
more
than a dozen other manufacturers of asbestos insulation were
the
targets of some 15,000 lawsuits. At first, the defendant
manufacturers
tried to claim that they did not know about the
asbestos
hazard until Dr. Selikoff's pioneering studies of the early
1960s.
However, plaintiff attorneys soon unearthed Sumner Simpson's
correspondence,
Vandiver Brown's letter asking Metropolitan Life to
water
down its report about asbestos disease, Dr. Smith's memorandum
about
why diseased asbestos workers were not informed of their
condition,
and hundreds upon hundreds of other documents that
furnished
overwhelming proof that officials of Johns?Manville,
Raybestos?Manhattan,
and other leading asbestos companies had known
products
for more than forty years. As a result, juries from one end
of
the nation to the other began awarding large compensatory damages
to
diseased asbestos workers and the survivors of workers who had
died
of asbestos disease. They also began assessing punitive damages
against
asbestos manufacturers for outrageous and reckless
misconduct.
Indeed, during 1981 and the first half of 1982, juries
in
ten different cases found Manville liable for punitive damages
totalling
more than six million dollars. The company and its
insurance
carriers had already settled some 2,000 asbestos?disease
cases
out of court for tens of millions of dollars.
A
new era in the asbestos tragedy began in August of 1982, when
Manville?a
corporation with assets of more than $2 billion?filed for
protection
under Chapter I I of the federal Bankruptcy Code,
claiming
that it had been unfairly victimized by thousands of
unwarranted
lawsuits. During the next six and a half years, while
the
affair languished in the Dickensian coils of the federal
bankruptcy
system, Manville was not required to pay a single dime to
any
of its thousands of victims. Moreover, when the final bankruptcy
plan
was approved, it made provision for compensating only 100,000
asbestos?disease
victims.
This
estimate was absurdly low by any reasonable standard of
judgment.
To begin with, Dr. Selikoff and his associates have
estimated
that between 200,000 and 300,000 people will die of
asbestos?related
lung cancer during the next twenty to thirty years.
Secondly,
of the 18 million or so American men and women still alive
who
have undergone occupational exposure to asbestos, it can
reasonably
be expected that as many as two million of them may
develop
X?ray evidence of asbestos disease. Third, studies already
conducted
indicate that fully 30% of the wives, children and family
members
of heavily exposed asbestos shipyard and factory
workers?some
200,000 people in all?are developing X?ray evidence of
asbestos
lung disease. Fourth, other studies show that about 30% of
the
school custodians in Boston, New York, and San Francisco are
developing
X?ray evidence of asbestos disease. And, finally, surveys
presently
underway indicate that about 30% of the nation's merchant
seamen,
who have been exposed to asbestos by virtue of having worked
in
the confines of ships, are also developing signs of asbestos
disease.
Thus, to assume that only 100,000 of nearly three million
potential
asbestos?disease claimants would bring claims was clearly
preposterous.
Indeed, there are now 150,000 asbestos?disease victims
who
have filed claims against the Manville Trust and other asbestos
manufacturers.
tragedy
has yet to be ascertained, and that when the statisticians
have
tallied the final toll, the casualties will have been far more
numerous
than our present society and its legal system is willing to
acknowledge.
Statistics can, of course, be a way of dehumanizing and
thus
denying the true dimensions of the misery that afflicts
asbestos
victims and the victims of other industrial and
environmental
disease who live among us. Fortunately, as an antidote
to
this possibility, we now have "Breath Taken," Bill Ravanesi's
moving
chronicle of the asbestos tragedy. By focussing upon the
human
condition, Ravanesi's splendid photographs demonstrate the
inadequacy
of statistics. Indeed, by revealing the pain,
bewilderment,
despair, and resignation etched in the faces of
asbestos
victims, he provides us with an indelible reminder that
statistics
are human beings, with the
tears wiped off.
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