Document 8ZpZgk4VN2k6JJ29E1r7g9ne

FILE NAME: Newspaper & Magazine Articles (NMA) DATE: 1968 Oct 12 DOC#: NMA012 DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION: The New Yorker - The Magic Mineral A REPORTER a BAC'K in the nineteen-twenties, ten the word "ASBESTOS" piently appeared m large block letters on the fireproof drop cur THE M A G IC M INERAL or unquenchable, is a broad term embracing a number of fibrous sili the forces of corrosion and decay under almost every condition of tempera ture and moisture (and of being resistant *$ well to the action of most acids, alkalies, tains that dosed off the proscenium cate minerals that are found in prac and other chemicals) it is just about openings of theatre stages, it was cus tically every country in the world. indestructible. I t looks extremely frag tomary in certain parts of the country According to g eo lo g ists, chrysotile ile, yet its fibres have a tensile strength for youngsters attending Saturday- asbestos-- a variety of the mineral equal to that of piano wire, Apparent matinee performances of " Charley's that accounts for ninety-five per cent of ly as light and feathery at; thistle- or Aunt" or "T he Vagabond King" or the world's production-- had its origin eiderdown, it is actually as heavy and " Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch" millions of years ago, when subterra dense as the rock from which it is to greet the raising of the asbestos cur nean upheavals provided fractures in extracted. In one sense, them, h its a tain with the chant " All school boys serpentine rock which were penetrated fibre of stone. In another sense, how*, eat stewed tomatoes on Saturday!" by water heated in the earth's interior. ever, it is a mineralgica) vegetable This was not, of course, an exercise in Subsequently, these waters dissolved whose fibres are so soft and flexible th&| mnemonics but an expression of youth some of the serpentine, and as the so they can be carded, spun, and woven ful exuberance, and, to a lesser extent, lutions cOoied, fibrous silicate crystals as'easily as fibres of cotton or flax. perhaps, a reflection of the tendency in began to grow within the fractures. Asbestos is the only mineral that can an era celebrated for parochialism and T he two other major varieties of as be woven into doth,- atad its fibrous flippancy to dismiss strange and exotic bestos---crocidolite and amosite-- orig structure is, if anything, even mora substances with jokes. Among older inated through somewhat different amazing than its remarkable ahibty wi people, it was certainly coirtmon knowl dynamic and thermal processes in meta- withstand h ea t In fact, if it Wire tsv-ul edge that asbestos was noncombustible, morphic rock, and their fibres, though for the electron microscope, the for when "Joe and Asbestos"-- the similar to chrysotile, possess different to which asbestos is fibrous wmdd fedn* syndicated comic strip about horse rac structural and chemical properties. Al fkult to believe, for there ejen uppioitt.. ing---first appeared in the Baltimore though known to man as early as the lately a million individual fibrils lymg Sun, in 1925, the stableHby named As Stone Age, when it was used in pot sWe by side in a linear inch <tf chrysnnie bestos explained to the readership that tery, asbestos was considered a novelty asbestos, whereas only thirty-eight hun lie had acquired his odd moniker be until the late eighteen-seventies, when dred glass fibrils, such as those found m cause " no matter how hot rny tips are, it began to be mined on a commercial various insulation materials, of six hun they'll never burn a hole in your pock- basis. Smce then, it: has achieved enor dred and 'pLi etbook." Such knowledge was hardly mous industrial importance because of aligned, along the same universal, however, for it was also true its unique and astonishing physical prop overy'iTiadditibn toi'itfiijr, ' that a popular put-on of the flapper erties. It appears to be highly combusti ness, high tensile strength, itnaota! (#*- age consisted of solemnly assuring a ble, yet it can withstand, the fiercest ihi!ity, spinnahiltry, and resist,mce to heat susceptible theatre companion that the heat. It seems as perishable as grass, but and the elements, asbestos fibres pos* funny-looking word on the curtain by virtue of being almost immune to stm great powers to adsorb and: to meant " Welcome" in Latin. T he fact of the matter is that nlthinigh asbestos was linked one way or another in the public mind with fire)-iroof theatre c u rta in s , many people thought its oiame was a trademark, few people knew that it was being iitilized in a wide variety of industrial prod- ucts, only a handiu 1 of medical researchers -were iust tile n beginning to1 sus- ;iect tinit it was affei,:tW; .he he;1:1th of the wnrk- r- wh ci handled it, and .tuall;v no one luid any area iriat it would one .lav pnave to he on e of a e me1n important indus- . -j u! canct-r m A": lter, Small wonder, then, that when Mbest^ which had been known to the [Midieh.ts as "the magic mineral,1" was, in effect, rediscovered less than a hun dred years'ago in the age o industrial expansion, it was put to work. Since that time, the demand for asbestos has risen almost as fast as the ptuff could be mined from the earth *nd rtiilled from its host rock. In 1879, rhen the world's first commercial as ta* mine was opened at Thetford, the Province of Quebec, only three ndrcd tons of the mineral was pro duced. By 1910, annual world produc tion had jumped to thirty thousand Suns; by the middle thirties, it had mfeas^d to five hundred thousand, tans; 'Mad today the total output is more than four million tons a year. Up ltd a few years ago, asbestos was ten called "the mineral of a thou- ses" by those who sold ft, but label has become obsolete, especial*; in .the United States, where it is ated that asbestos may iiave | | ; y a three thousand different tiiitrial applications. The United States the largest consumer of asbestos in World, importing nearly a rAlian Mms a year, mostly chrysotile from Canada, and since fully ninety-five r cent of this amount i$ used in bioation with other raw materi- such as Portland cement,: asphalt, vinyl and other plastics--`asbestos is sent as an invisible and anonymous redient in a myriad of industrial nets, many of which are never ndfied as containing asbestos even gh it may constitute up to fifty per t of their content. The asbestos-cement industry, which the principal consumer of the min- tnakes shingles for roofing and g, sheets for exterior and interior i, insulation board, clapboard, cas is for electric motors, pipes to carry ter, sewage, and gas, and numerous r products. Asbestos textiles are I not only in fireproof theatre curis but also in lagging and other inluting wrapping, in conveyor belting safety clothing, in pot holders, ."wong-hoard covers, draperies, rugs, motion-picture screens, as filters in i masks and in the processing of fruit acids, beer, and medicines, and '*tt mailbags, prison-cell padding, air#Mie fittings, stove and lamp wicks, rkplugs, and fire hose. The electri:-equipment industry has depended ears on asbestos yarn and tape for uing conductors ranging from : gauge wire to heavy cable, and `v. n asbestos friction materials--: U as brake lininos and rlotrh f. > Iftx,{ II wm tfet | !tgs--are found in cars, trucks, trac|ors, power shovels, hoists, and other -idustrial machines, as are asbestos' ;>>th packings, seals, and gaskets. Asi stos papers and felts are used for l nofmg, for piano padding, for lining ' toves, heaters, filing cabinets, military lelmets, and the mufflers and hoods d automobiles, and they also are found armored cars, carpets, and car, iidgcs, and as boiler jackets and radi a t o r covers. Asbestos millboard, which $- a heavier version of asbestos paper, * used for acoustical ceilings, as plasju-rhoard and fireproof wallboard, and in electric switch boxes, safes, table pads, stove mats, ovens, and dry kilns. Vinyl and asphalt floor tiles contaih anywhere from thirty to fifty per cent, by weight, of short asbestos fibres, and '. plane, train, ship, missile, or engine jp ; any sort that does not contain as- A*Miiss in some form or other, and it found its way into literally every buiMing, factory, home, and farm >!-iss the land. And, because its mi- t'.le fibres are eminently respirable, ;i.+vestos has also found its way into the ;gs of man, where, by remaining as ' : `strueiihle as it does in nature, it can *ak terrible havoc. r HE adverse biological effects of asbestos were observed as early as first century by the Greek geogSKier Strabo and by the Roman natihst Pliny the Elder, both of whom nrtowed in passing a sickness of the igs m slaves whose occupation was v. e.r, e asbestos into cloth. Strabo J Plim were calling attention for the a time in history to a disease that Id one day be known as asbesto-a form of pneumoconiosis (the lungs) caused hy the inhalation of iiii fibres and particles of asbestos-- uut to -tncients were much too awed h\ ti magic of the mineral to be concrrm. with the possibility that it might cm; `titute a health hazard. Indeed, the attitude toward asbestos some-tirm - hr dered on veneration. Strabo and PI tarch noted that the " perpetual" .. k used in the sacred and int ct nr ,;si,. hie lamps of the vestal virgin- we. made of asbestos, and Pliny dc-, rihc< ; asbestos cloth, which had hem used ; for centuries in cremations, as the ran ) and costly " funeral dress of kings." I t ! was generally assumed in ancient times; that asbestos was of vegetable origin-..5 Pliny called it "iinum v iv u m " and l the second-century Greek topographer' Pausanias referred to it as " the only linen that is not consumed by fin " and this misconception endured for centuries. (Only a few years ago, a major shareholder of an English as bestos company who was visiting the i source of its supplies in South Africa asked the resident manager where the plantations were.) T he Romans wen especially impressed by the fact that when cloth made of asbestos was ex posed to flame it always came out whiter than before-- hence the Latin word for asbestos, amiantus, meaning unpolluted or undefiled---and they ar< said to have cleaned asbestos dinner napkins by tossing them into the fire. T he use of asbestos in Europe ap pears to have diminished greatly during the Dark Ages, although it is said that the Emperor Charlemagne convinced some warrior guests from a rival king dom that he possessed magic powers hv throwing an asbestos tablecloth inn the fire and then withdrawing it, un scathed, from the flames. In the latter part of the thirteenth century, when the indefatigable Venetian traveller M ar co Polo was traversing a part of Si beria then known as the Great Em pire of T artary, he was shown some cloth that would not burn, and was told by his T artar hosts that it was made from salamander's wool. Tim wily to be taken in by a story like that, Marco examined the material carefully and, after making some inquiries, learned that there was a mineral in the mountains of the district that con tained threads like those of wool. In 1720, asbestos deposits were discovered in the Ural Mountains, and forty yearlater a factory was built to manu facture asbestos products. Because tin known uses of the mineral were feu and the demand was limited, this first commercial attempt to revive the long- Sormant asbestos industry was a failure, ut the second attempt, which took dace slightly more than a century later, I succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of fits backers. As a result, the fact that isbestos could produce lung disease, which had been forgotten since Strabo and Pliny first recorded it around the time of Christ, soon manifested itself again. Modern knowledge of asbestosis dates from the year 1900, when a post mortem examination was performed by Dr. H. Montague Murray, a physician in London's Charing Cross Hospital, on the body of a thirty-three-year-old man who had worked for fourteen years in an asbestos-textile factory. The yutient, found to have been suffering from severe pulmonary fibrosis, which 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. Iflkfitay found spicules of asbestos in the lung tissues at autopsy, he was able establish a presumptive connection |*tweea the man's occupation and the disease that killed him. A few years later, an inspector in the Department of Labor at Caen, whose name was Auribault, reported the results of what wa* undoubtedly the first study of mortality among asbestos workers. Ac cording to Auribault, whose account appeared in the Bulletin de l'Inspection u Travail et de L'Hygiene Industrielle, an asbestos-weaving mill had been established in 1890 at Conde-surNoireau, in Calvados, and during its first five years of operation, when there was no artificial ventilation and the employees were heavily exposed to ust from the looms, fifty of them died. Moreover, the director of the fac tory, who had previously owned a cot ton mill at Gonneville, in Manche, had recruited seventeen workers from .his former staff, of whom sixteen were wiped out by what Auribault, who was not a physician, mistakenly described as chalicosis-- a pneumoconiosis common among stonecutters. Unfortunately, neither Murray nor Auribault realized the importance of their findings. Testifying before a De partmental Committee on Compensa tion for Industrial Diseases, in 1906, Murray said, " One hears, generally (leaking, that considerable trouble is w w taken to prevent the inhalation of lust, and so the disease is not so likely to cur as heretofore," and the conclud ing recommendation of Auribault's re-.irt was simply that people under ghteen years of age should not be ala - .1 to work in dusty conditions. Be- cause of ignorance about the cm v of the disease, and because it m.ui'i <.^-<1 itself slowly and insidious!, <\t-t riod of from ten to twrntv yeai* more, asbestosis was probable mo t | ten than not misdiagnosed in tin part of the century as pulmonan toberculosis, silicosis, or fibrosing pneu monia. In addition, coyness on the part of industry, timidity on the part of la bor, and obtuseness on the part of the medical profession often combined to make early investigations into the health of asbestos workers meaningless. As a result, even though the asbestos indus try was growing very rapidly in all the industrialized countries of the world, almost nothing was done to control dust levels in asbestos factories, and almost no medical information on asbestosis was gathered during the quarter of a century that followed the disclosures of Murray and Auribault---although as bestos workers were probably dying like flies of it. It was 1924 before the first clear ase of death due to asbestosis ap peared in medical literature. In that rear, l)r. W . E. Cooke, an English physician, who gave the disease its name, performed a post-mortem ex amination on a thirty-three-year-old woman patient who had started work ing at the age of thirteen in an asbestostextile factory in which there was no provision for the removal of dust. By 1917, after thirteen years of exposure, she had been coughing and in bad Health, and from then on her attendance at work had been inter mittent because of shortness of breath and lassitude. T he autopsy showed extensive pul monary fibrosis and dense strands of abnor mal fibrous tissue connecting the lungs and I the pleural membranes j surrounding them. In addition, Cooke noted the presence of solid yellowish-brown particles, which he called "curious bodies," in the areas of fibrosis. " W e have never seen any thing parallel to this in pneumoconi osis due to other dusts, nor have we oeen table to find such occurrence in denature," he declared, and he added, `We cannot think there is any reason able doubt that the particles in the lung -<re the heavy, brittle, iron-containing fragments of asbestos fibre." Cooke's discovery, which was pubshed in the British Medical Journal of !uly 26, 1924, and republished in ;92~, provided the point of departure for a scientific journey that started on an apparently straightforward path of occupational hygiene and that has since branched out into epidemiology, on cology, physical chemistry, physiology, and experimental pathology. As a re sult of studies made between 1927 and 1931, a whole literature relating to asbestosis appeared in Great Britain, which included clinical and X-ray find ings, descriptions of the histology of the disease, and the hypothesis (soon widely accepted) that the strange-looking yel lowish-brown bodies noticed by Cooke were asbestos fibres that had been al tered by the reaction of lung tissue, and coated with a colloidal substance rich in iron. In fact, Cooke's "curious bodies" proved to be so abundant in the lungs of autopsied asbestos workers, many of which contained literally bil lions of them, that they quickly came to be called "asbestos bodies." T he most important investigation of this period was conducted by Dr. E. R. A. Merewether, a medical in spector for the Factory Department of the British Home Office. Between ] 928 and 1929, he examined three hundred and sixty-three asbestos-textile workers out of an estimated total of twenty-two hundred asbestos workers employed in Great Britain at the time, and found that ninety-five, or slightly more than twenty-five per cent, showed evidence of suffering from pulmonary fibrosis. He also demonstrated that the inci dence of fibrosis increased in direct pro portion to the number of years of exposure, reaching eighty-one per cent in the group of workers who had been employed in the indus try for twenty years or more. As a result ot Merewether's re port, Parliament passed legislation in 1931 that made asbestosis a compensable disease, required improved methods of exhaust ventilation and dust suppression in as bestos-textile factories, and instituted periodical medical examinations for workers engaged in particularly dusty processes in tie asbestos-textile industry. After this promising burst of activity, however. po-tMess in the field of asbes tosis " !i pressingly slow, for, as tilingsu .i i m I out, the doctors had only begun to scratch the surface of a prob lem of bewildering complexity. Many im stag,itors assumed that the new reg ulations would prove effective in con trolling the disease, thus failing to ap ple, iate the fact that, once inhaled, asbestos, which is virtualh imlestrucriicontinues to react within the lungs t a lifetime, and to heed the warning Me rewether, who, when asked if t\\ years of exposure was sufficient to canasbestosis in a young girl, replied, " Yi if she lives long enough." Moivuvei techniques of dust sampling were primi tive and inaccurate, and dust hie! varied so greatly-- not only from fac tory to factory hut from area to area within a given factory-- that it would have been almost impossible to establish i criteria upon which to recommend a ", safe level of exposure. But as time { went by, the generally lowered dust ] levels that did result from the regula- ? dons of 1931. appeared to he slowing down the attack rate of the disease, at 1 least in Great Britain, and the life ex- | pectancy of the average asbestos-textile f worker was further increased hy the advent of antibiotics, which drastically reduced the death rate from infectious pulmonary diseases that often liad to be feared as a complication of asbestosis. The totally unforeseeable consequence of all this was that asbestos workers, in stead of dying of asbestosis, began living long enough to develop asbestos-in duced cancer. The first published suggestion of an association between asbestosis and ma lignant disease was made in 193S hy Dr. Kenneth M. Lynch, professor of pathology at the Medical College of South Carolina, who described the case of a fifty-seven-year-old asbestos weaver who died of asbestosis and in whose lungs cancer was also found. Because the regulations of 1931 required Brit ish coroners to conduct autopsies on men who had been suspended front work with asbestos on account of pul monary disability*or when their length of service rendered it likely that their occupation was a contributory cause of death, pathologists in Britain were able to investigate the suggested link between asbestosis and lung cancer much more easily than their counter parts in the United States, where few states had w o rk m e n 's compensation laws covering dust diseases, and where there were no specific regulations re quiring post-mortem examinations of asbestos workers. T he British investi gations were not made the subject of official comment until 1949, however, when Dr. Me rewether, who was then Chief Inspector of Factories, published a review of data that had been accum ulated from 1924 to 1946, which re vealed that lung cancer was present in thirty-one out of two hundred and thirty-five deaths that were caused by asbestosis or in wb h asbestosis was at autopsy. This was an incice of slightly more than thirteen cent, and Merewether found it ily significant, for lung cancer, ac cording to its incidence in the general .population, should only have been pres ent in approximately one per cent of the iases. At the time, no formal claim of an association between the two diseases Was made, but during the next few 'years an increasing amount of evidence began to establish one. Then, in 1955, p r. Richard S. Doll, director of the Statistical Research Unit of the British Medical Research Council, completed study of a hundred and thirteen o*ncutive autopsies of men with more than twenty years of exposure in a large asbestos-textile factory, which bowed that the extent to which thev risked lung cancer over the whole riod was eleven times as great as erf men in thegeperal population England and Wales. From then , many doctor* were convinced that causal relationship between asbestos ire and lung cancer had been otoimrated, although almost no part the vast asbestos industry either owledged the relationship or found advisable to aid the independent rerchers #ho were investigating it. F this point* many epidemiolgists had concluded that the hazards human health presented by asbestos were limited to the relatively small group of heavily exposed workers cngaged in making asbestos textiles. The trouble was that very few studies had j been made of the tens of thousands of workers engaged in other branches of the industry, which was then expand ing at an enormous rate all over the world, so that no one really had any way of knowing whether there was any danger from moderate or light ccupational exposure-- or, for that, matter, from indirect, non-occupationaif lncposure. Such studies were under way w a number of countries, however, anti .when the results began to appear, in th|| kite fifties, it became evident that t Hazard posed to man by asbestos )i;h mce again been underestimated. T he most dramatic development w rhe discovery of an association betwe: exposure to asbestos and mesotbi-boir an almost always malignant tumor the pleura, which is the delicati men hrane that encases the lungs, Ol of if peritoneum, a similar membrane t line-, the abdominal cavity. Prcviou mesothelioma had been so rare the was considered a pathological <uri< it was found in only mu ou even ten thousand autopse t ' ? listed in most medical books, and 5 was not even coded separately in the ^ >rld Health Organization's Interna* ial Classification of Diseases. In -!56 and 1957, however, sixteen cases this rare tum or-tantam ount to an 7demic-- were diagnosed at tile Pneut.voniosis Research Unit in Johanv sburg, South Africa, by a pathologist ,'tmed J. Christopher W agner. T w o ucumstances led Dr. W agner and his nciates to suggest that asbestos might some part in the mysterious outIteeak: asbestos bodies had been found at iWtitopsy in the lungs of the very first .ase, and ten of the cases had come from a hospital to which patients sus^ected of suffering from tuberculosis *#ere referred from a large crocidoliteItbestq mining area. At the beginning, this hypothesis teem ed rather tenuous, for none of the teen patients Who suffered from nesotheliotna had ever worked in as- stos mines or mills. Within a short riod, however, cases of mesothelioma |a n to crop up elsewhere in South Africa, and when W agner and ivs asso ciates discovered that the father of one their new mesothelioma patients had Snspn the manager of an asbestos mine, "id that the patient had played around the mine and on the adjacent dumps as child, they undertook to reinvestigate sixteen original cases and to ob tain detailed life histories in all future oases. By the end of 1961, they had diagnosed a total of eighty-seven mesotheliomas of the pleura and two mesotheliomas of the peritoneum. Only iitnwlvt* of the cases proved to have industrial exposure to asbestos, -tout all the rest came from the arid, windswept region of. the Cape asbestos fields, where they could easily have sus tained exposure simply by living in the vicinity of asbestos mills and dumps. A particularly striking case was that of a woman who was horn in a town on the asbestos fields, left the region at the age f five, and died of a pleural mesothehoma at the age of fifty-seven. Detailed questioning about her childhood re pealed that she had attended a kinder garten near an asbestos dump and that he and her playmates (two of whom Iso died of mesothelioma ) used to env sliding down the dump on their aay home from school. Another examtie w as provided by the youngest pa* nt of the series-- a man who died at . < age of twenty-one. He had been posed to asbestos from the age of six ai-eks until he was weaned-- a period ring which his mother took him otig with her when she went to work robbing site, which is a place where asbestos is separated from it* host roe Even among those patient- wh< worked in asbestos mine-, the act exposure appeared to have been slight for in most cases the lungs showed evidence of asbestosis but only a few bestos bodies and fibres in the air spat From this, Wagner drew the chill conclusion that mesothelioma might suit from an exposure to asbestos, d that was considerably less than t/i needed to produce fibrosis-- the i tion that had always been considered sential for the development of asbest lung cancer. (In some areas of South Africa, occupational exposure to she dust was so heavy, however, that brosis of the lungs was almost certain ly killing people before cancer could develop. According to Dr. G. W. Schepers, a native of South Africa who is now director of the Bureau of l* oratories in the Department of Health in Washington, D.C., conditions industrial hygiene in the asbestos mines and factories were often "deplorahle In 1949, when Schepers was sent the northeastern Transvaal to make the first official radiological and dinka# survey of the asbestos industry for South African government, he found barefoot Bantu children spending the days inside large jute shipping where they were forced by oversee armed with whips to trample dowm fluffy amosite asbestos as it came cading over their heads into the hags., Schepers found that a number of these children had developed asbestos with cor pulmonale-- right-sided heart ure, which often accompanies the ease-- before die age of twelve, and has said that he would be very *n prised if any of them had lived long enough to develop either lung canc or mesothelioma.) In 1960, the year that Wagner pub* lished the first of his disturbing repo about mesothelioma, there were additional developments that cau grave concern among Scientists invest* gating the asbestos prohlem. One them occurred in Finland, where Raimo Kiviluoto, a radiologist, been surveying the general population for tuberculosis; he detected deposit^ of calcium on the pleura, which previously been seen almost exclusiv ly in asbestos workers, in four hur dred and ninety-nine out of sixty-th hundred and twelve people ( most farmers and their wives) who lived county where asbestos had been mim and milled for many years, and nopleut calcifications in seventy-one hundred and one people who lived in a boring county where there was ru bestos industry. T he other development took place back in South Africa, where Dr. J. G. Thomson, professor of pathology at the Medical School of the University of Cape Town, was examining lung-fluid smears from five Inindred consecutive autopsies to determine the extent to which the ordinary urban dweller was exposed to the inhalation of asbestos; he found asbestos bodies in twenty-five per cent of the total, Thomson's discovery astonished the medical world, for up until that time HO one suspected that asbestos bodies might be present in the lungs of people who did . ot work in asbestos mines or factories. He pointed out, however, that there had been a tremendous increase in the use of asbestos throughout |$te world over the, previous twenty years---three million tons were market4 in 1960-- and that asbestos was being incorporated into an increasing number and variety of industrial products with which the ordinary urban dweller came into intimate daily contact. He also suggested that the air of city streets was a likely source of asbestos exposure, and that the average motor vehicle, which wears out three or four sets of asbestos brake linings and one or two asbestos clutch, facings in its lifetime, might well be a major cause of the liberation of asbestos dust, Thomson reminded his colleagues that, compared to a half-life of twenty-eight years for strontium 90, the half-life of aibestos fibre was an infinity of years, and he concluded that, because of the contin uous disintegration of asbestos products such as brake linings, floor tiles, and roofing ma terials, as well as the demolition of buildings containing numerous other asbestos products, asbestos was constantly finding its way into the atmosphere as an everlasting contami nant. He even went so far as to pre diet that in future decades, as the accumulation of asbestos in urban areas led inexorably to higher concentrations of asbestos fibres in the lungs of urban dwellers, asbestos-induced neoplasms would rival cigarette-induced lung cancer as a cause of death. As might be expected, the disclosures made by W agner, Kiviluoto, and Thomson provided a powerful stimulus >'or further investigation of the prob:cm of asbestos exposure. During the next few years, a hunt for mesothelio mas and asbestos bodies was undertaken iy pathologists all over the world. Thomson's observations were confirmed by studies made in Miami, in London, and in Belfast, while in Pittsburgh asbestos bodies were found in the lungs of forty-six of a hundred consecutive autopsies at Presbyterian-University Hospital. And W agner's findings were corroborated by investigations that associated mesothelioma with exposure to asbestos in half a dozen cities in Europe and the United States. Perhaps the most striking confirmation of W agner's data came from London, where D r. Muriel L. Newhouse and Dr. Hilda Thompson, of the Department of Occupational Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, investigated the life histories of seventy-six cases of mesothelioma that had been confirmed by autopsy or biopsy in London Hospital. T o no one's surprise, thirty-one of the seventy-six patients had worked with asbestos, but eleven of those who had died had simply lived within half a mile of an asbestos factory, and nine others--seven women and two men-- were relatives of asbestos workers, Most of these women had washed their husbands' work clothes regularly. The investigators learned that one of the husbands, a docker, had come home " white with asbestos" every evening for three or four years, and that his wife had brushed him down. Both of the men in this group, when boys of eight or nine years, had had sisters who worked in asbestos-textile factories. One of the sisters had been em ployed as a spinner from 1925 to 1936, and had died of asbestosis in 1947, at which time it was determined at an inquest that "she used - to return home from work with dust on her clothes." Her brother, who had ap parently sustained no other exposure to asbestos in his lifetime, died in 1956 of a pleural mesothelioma, Further corroboration of W agner's findings came from southeastern Pennsylvania, where Dr. Jan Lieben, then head of the Division of Occupational Health at the State Department of Health, in Harrisburg, investigated the backgrounds of forty-two people whe had died of mesntln-lioma between 1958 and 1963. Of the forty-two patients, ten proven to have had definite occupational - vposurc to asbestos, three were rclatiw s o f asbestos workers, eight either lived or were employed in the vicinity ot an asbestos factory, and ten. others were discovered to have had at (east some minor exposure to the min eral. T he ten people with minor exposure included a self-employed maker of Swiss cheese who used a fivehundred-gallon boiler covered with asbestos insulation that flaked off on contact, a salesman who had mixed and applied asbestos-cement insulation to boilers in his home, and a fourteentear-old boy who at one time had helped his father saw up and install plasterboard during an extensive re modelling of their house. From an epidemiological point of view, the investigations that tended to support the findings of W agner and Thomson were Weak, because they pcked a defined population as a base gainst which the data could be meas ured. O n the other hand, the presence h i asbestos bodies in; the lungs of such a large percentage of consecutive .autop sies in so many widely distributed cities -{ the world was sufficient to indicate fiat asbestos fibres were probably being inhaled by a majority of urban dwell ers everywhere, and the association between asbestos; and mesothelioma Was striking enough to suggest that a history of exposure to the mineral [was likely to be found whenever a [positive diagnosis of the tumor was made. As a result, epidemiologists were forced to revise their idea that asbestos Was only an industrial hazard, and to give serious consideration to Thom son's prediction that it might prove to be dangerous for untold numbers 1of unsuspecting people in the general community. IN October of 1964, in order to re view the data collected, in the past and to discuss the problems awaiting solution in the future, the New York Academy of Sciences sponsored an in ternational Conference on the Biologi cal Effects of Asbestos, at the WaldorfAstoria. T he conference enabled more than four hundred scientists from all over the world to discuss the immense ly complicated epidemiological and linical problems that had appeared in he forty years since Dr. Cooke de scribed the first clear case of asbestosis, nd its planning was largely the work one of its co-chairmen, Dr. Irving Selikoff, who is head of the Divi. >a of Environmental Medicine at or- City University's M ount Sinai bool of Medicine, director of its / nvironmental Sciences Laboratory, ad a pioneer in the field of modern adiestos epidemiology. Like many of his colleagues at the atference, Dr. Selikoff became inter- ested in asbestos in a round about A native of New York C'>i\, Ik terned at Beth Israel Hospital m NV` ark; did his pathology at Mount Sin. where he has been a member of t; staff since 1947; and became a clu physician at the Sea View Hospital (a Staten Island, specializing in tuh'-ro,. losis. In 1951, he participated m tin basic research on isoniazid-- the anti biotic drug that, by effectively lading tubercle bacilli, has provided a cure for tuberculosis-- for which he receivi the American Public Health Assoct tion's Albert Lasker Award in Med cine. In 1953, D r. Selikoff founded . medical clinic in Paterson, New Jerset where, by chance, seventeen of h early patients were men referred for chest-disease consultations who workers in a local factory that had been mak ing asbestos-insulation materials sine 1940. W hen the factory closed down in 1954, the seventeen men went into other work, and at that point Dr. Seli koff decided to continue his observa tion of these patients with X-ray ex aminations and pulmonary-function tests in order to determine the bistort and the natural course of asbestosis femen who would not be subjected further exposure. At the time, Dr. Selikoff was chiefly interested in asbestosis because, as H* has explained, " I was still unconvinced of the relationship between asbestos an# lung cancer. There wasn't much dating and what there was scarcely seemed A indicate that it would prove to fey much of a problem." As things turned out, he changed his mind. In 1954 all seventeen men from the Paterson factory were able-bodied and work ing. By 1961, however, six of then were dead, and today only six of thewt are alive. O f the eleven who died four were victims pf lung cancer, th r of other cancers, one of mesothelioma, and two of asbestosis. O f the six wh. are still alive, two are disabled because of respiratory insufficiency caused b* fibrosis of the lungs, and one has re covered from surgery for cancers the lung and larynx. D r. Seliko# shook his head in describing the faa of these patients, but as early as 19f their ranks had been thinned out s drastically that, as he said, " I wforced to the awful realization of wk* could happen to men who were oc> pationally exposed to asbestos." At* the company that owned the fact'said it was unable to make its emplment records available, he wrote several other Urge asbestos manut* turers in the l iuo d States, in q u iry about the health exp: mW in H- jftants, and was unable to obtain in formation from any of them. Mean- hile, he and Dr. Jacob Churg, chief thologist at Barnert Memorial Hos, in Paterson, who had been findasbestosis and lung cancer in a rge number of workers from the Patrson factory, took their data to Dr. oscoe P . ' Kandle, Commissioner of New Jersey State Department of alth, and Dr. Kandle applied to the itcd States Public Health Service for funds to undertake a study of the Pat erson factory and to make a statewide wirvey to determine how many people were being occupationally exposed to asbestos. However, the request was denied for lack of resources. Since Dr. Selikoff already knew that wen who had worked in the factory made insulation materials were dyof asbestosis and lung cancer at alarming rate, he considered that a who were installing such materials 1st also risk disease, and early in 2 he made contact with officials of Wew York Local 12 and Newark Lo32 of the International Association Heat and Frost Insulators and Astvxtos Workers. T he asbestos insulators been trying for years to interest tors and various government agenin their medical problems, so they re only too glad to cooperate, and rged Dr. Selikoff to make a study in 4**pth of the effects of asbestos expoMire among their members. During the next six months, Dr. Selikoff and his administrative assistant, rs. Janet S. Kaffenburgh, pored through the unions' records and com piled a list of the names and addresses >f the six hundred and thirty-two men who had been members of either of the metropolitan locals on December 31, 1942, and of the eight hundred and ninety men who had joined between then and December 31, 1962. From the unions' employment records, they obtained detailed work histories of the total membership of fifteen hundred and twenty-two men, including data *>n their withdrawal from work for other employment, war service, retire ment, or illness. This enabled them to alculate the onset and duration of ex:v)Siii-e to asbestos for each worker. Records of the unions' health and wel; ire funds provided them with the dates rid places of death of the two hundred rid sixty-two workers who had died tween 1942 and 1962, and copies of ee death certificates of all but one of u ni were obtained. In addition, auopsy protocols, histological specimens, .nd hospital records were reviewed by 1>r. Selikoff and Dr. Churg in those atlw ' approximately one-half of tli >tal) which occurred in hospitals. In the next phase of the study, I ); Hikoff and Dr. Churg were joiiuv Dr. E. Cuyler Hammoml, Vice 'resident. for Epidemiology and Sta .tics of the American Cancer Societt ho had participated in an analysis o it medical effects of the atomic ex lesions that devastated Hiroshima am ugasaki, in 1945, and whose large tie epidemiological studies of tnon .m a million men and women pro bed a major basis for the conclusion awn it the 1964 Surgeon General': port on the effects of cigarette smok- Since previous studies had sugsted that lung cancer associated with t*bestosis seldom develops until twent) wars after initial exposure to asbestos st, Dr. Selikoff and Dr. Hammond tided to limit their first report to the hundred and thirty-two men who ere on the union rolls as of Decernr 31, 1942. Taking the men's ages :o consideration, Dr. Selikoff and Dr. ammond then set about comparing e number and causes of death among m with those of the general male spulation in the United States. The Sults were depressing. According to standard mortality tables, two inur ed and three deaths could have been iected among the six hundred and rty-two workers. Instead, there re two hundred and fifty-five, not nting seven men who had died betncurring twenty years of expo- ire-- an excess of twenty-five per cent. e reason for the excess was not hard k find. T he fact that twelve of the ths were attributed to asbestosis was 1 particularly surprising, but only six seven, deaths from cancer of the lung, ura, or trachea were to be expected, eaS mere were forty-five. And re nine or ten gastro-intestinal can- were to be expected there were tually twenty-nine. Since the lung e r death rate was known to more than ten times as high ng cigarette smokers as among i-smokers, D r. Selikoff and Dr. mmond realized that they would ve to take the smoking habits of the stos-ins ilation workers into account their findings were to have any va. It was, of course, impossible for to ascertain this with accuracy in cases of the two hundred and fiftymen who had died, so, for purposes calculation, they assumed that all six ftdred and thirty-two men had ked a pack or more of cigarettes It day, and they demonstrated that *-n if this had been the case it would ve produced a lung-cancer death rate general male popular smoking, therefore, e-i M'l: the fact that in this . - -1 insulation worki > tin f11 ; f r o m l u n g r a t i o > s HU'S 1 expected rate. Because of - .|>|(-cti' > and its thru. . it S' 11 ducted In I) . Hammond a d the medical ..immunity when published, in the spring of 19(> - Journal of the American \ t , a socuition, anti when it was d .ere before the Conference on the lXuogi cal Effects of Asbestos that (Xu r. It was the first study ever made tb.it had taken a large enough group of ;iei>estos workers from a point far enough back in time .and followed them long ( itotigl to determine unequivocally what then health experience had been. Unbk al most all the previous investigations which simply indicated that then- was an association between asbestos and various kinds of cancer, it was based upon the incidence of disease within defined population, and thus answered a fundamental epidemiological questio of how many cancers had developer! out of how many persons exposed. In doing so, it furnished the first incon trovertihle evidence that industrial ex posure to asbestos was hazardous; established sound methodology for fu tore studies; and it marked a turning point in the views held by doctois ; health officials around the world. I N the autumn of 1962, I)r. Seli koff-- using donations from privau sources and a grant awarded In the Health Research Council of Net* York City, headed by Dr. Georg S. Mirick-- had set up informal clinic at union halls in New York amt Newark and started giving X-ra\ examinations, pulmonary-function tests and blood tests to the member.of the two asbestos workers' locab During the next year, he examine: eleven hundred and seventeen workei-> and he also questioned them close! about their smoking habits, the kind of materials they used, and the combtions under which they worked. "Tin insulation workers, an intelligent am. highly skilled group of craftsmen, pa tiently educated me concerning tintrade," he once said. " I learned th e they had had comparatively light ai intermittent exposure as asbestos work ers go, becuHT they often worked me of-doors on construction projects, an because most of the materials they n s had an asbestos m nti'rit nf less cbo: p-an per cent. I also found i..,n iheir problems had been negk v>Most of them had never seen a la`n inspector in their lives, and unit handful could remember seeing anyon ; make a dust-level count in die an where they were at work." IF . > 1 4o>ff also learned that although s. 4 the workers knew the) run a t** 4 developing asbeStosis (which tlu .usually referred to as silicosis) alm< tine of them had any idea that then -1*1 risked cancer because of their <*. ,(upation. As things turned out, * `fund radiological evidence of sbtWo in fully half of the eleven b u n d io nwl seventeen men; T he extent of rtv: irosis varied directly with the .dure m of exposure. O f three hundred and rty-six mep 'whose exposure had he rn less than ten years before, onh up. t cent showed-any abnormality, and three hundred and seventy-nine men *ho had been exposed for between ten >mi nineteen years more than half still. d mmai X-rays; tit neither group; *as there aiiy ^sfeernible evidence off1 i uncer, O n tjw other haiid, D r. Seliko^ biund that among three hundred a# tiinetv-two men with more than w years of exposure three hundred amt thirty-nine had developed asbestow* which had by that time become mtxi 'ate or extensive in more than fifr< per cent of the cases; he also found tlyge deven of the men had developed caar o r s of the lung or pleura. Aided by yearly grants from tte: Wealth Research Council, Dr. Self %>ff has maintained a close watch o* #he asbestos workers' health, paying articular attention to those men wnf] .ore than twenty years of exposure f eamining them once or twice a yea? \s a result, he has been able to dcteiyk symptoms of illness in many of the miry much earlier than they might have be*f detected and to observe with great at curacy the mortality experience of tF dove hundred and seventy whom jw mind in 1963 to he survivors of to, rigmal six hundred and thirtv-twmembers of the union in 1942. It cm unties to he disastrous. Between Jan .ire of 1963 and March of 1968, fit deaths would normally' have been i lecteil to occur among these men. F . -Haul, there were a hundred and th i teen. Fifteen of them were caused isbestosis, and, as witli the ear' study, the rest of the excess turned i to he caused by cancer of various kin !'\t o or three bronchogenic o n , * would have been normal, but tvti ight occurred, and wliere the ,u t aides predicted only two gastn in.il cancers there were eight. V pcctedly sJiarp rise in the number esotheliomas was observed. In tlJ srlier study, there had been ordv f<nJ f>'e t\do hundred and fiftv-five death' tween 1963 and 1968, howeve irteen of these rare tumors we: ound in a hundred and thirteen dear IOr. Selikoff suspects that the latel rriod for mesothelioma may he long nan that for either asbestosis or lur. J | .nicer, hut so far he regards the heavtl i ncrease of mesothelioma anionCs tin: [insulation workers as something of ; mystery. D r. Selikoff and Dr. Hammo# lilmind special significance in the fa-. *1 filial all twenty-eiglit hronchogeni ;. arcinomas occurred among asbesto! /workers who smoked cigarettes regnal Marly. None were found among eighty* |even men who never sinoked cig,fttes. D r. Selikoff and Dr. Hammond [*ave reservations about these data.! which suggest that asbestos workeiyl Iwho smoke cigarettes are ninety tim| lino re likely to die of lung cancer thaiiil Wien who .either Jyork with ksbest<l |n o r smoke, because they are basefff the , experiepce of a , relatively! nail number of people. They do comil from it;: however, that an im* irtant co-carcinogenic effect exists bc-I tween asbestos exposure and cigarette: joking, and in a recent article pub! hed in' the Journal of..iw A merit ledtcnl Association they recommew |iat asbestos exposure be minimized,, |$at asbestos workers who do not sm o b J never start, and that those m u king should stop immediately." [ ti been suggested in some quarterij t asbestos fibres, which are knov be highly adsorbent as well as vkii indestructible, may retain thyf stance known as benzo [a j pyre* cigarette smoke for long pern time in lung tissue, thus tending *duce lung cancer by a synergisri*! feet. No one knows for sure, howeve Dr. Selikoff will not hazard a gue tit the matter until more inform*! no is gathered. He expresses certaintyl stwut the effects of asbestos exposure 1 *ly when he has epidemiological proof, f knows, for example, that one out] every five asbestos-insulation workwho die in the New York-New] ' jh rsey metropolitan area dies of Iung . alice r, and that almost half of th # l i three hundred and sixty-eight deaths heJ recorded am ong these men i < tbclj Ipiist twenty-five years have been caused i i M cancer of one type or another. Last] [March, citing these figures before a'i l*louse subcommittee on labor, he] !,<rned that " if they are projected to] l. country as a whole, and if no im- ?| 154 Total Recall This Fujica Single-8 Instant Load camera has a photographic "memory". It records what you see just as you see it. Clear, bright, true-to-life. Unique features not found in any other instant load movie system make this pos sible. The camera has a built-in pressure plate. You have nothing to do with i t . .. but it does something important for you ... automatically locks the film flat behind the lens to give you the sharpest movies you've ever seen outside a theatre screen. Even if you've never taken a movie before, you get professional results easily. Drop in cartridge. . . aim . .. shoot! A full 50 continuous feet if you wish with no film flipover. Zoom in or zoom out! Fully automatic electric eye sets correct expo sure. Reflex lens gets you exactly what you see. Less than $125. Other Fujica Single-8s less than $ 8 0 ... at camera stores or write for the colorful facts. <BW> FUJI PHOTO FILM U.S.A., Inc. U.S. Distributor: Ehrenreich Photo-Optical Industries, Inc., Garden City, N.Y. 11530 In Canada: R. & H. Products, Ltd. FU JIC A IN STA N T LOAD ( 'S in g le -a ) Reflex Zoom P-300 provement in tin -alth li.t/ards these men face isacha . !. we m.iv look for ward to perhaps v \ tin omiuI deaths from lung cam aid m p, chaps fifteen thousand dead- .m cancer in general among men in ' single asbestos trade alone." Conem ring that the total membership .1 the luu national As sociation oi Hear and f rost Insulators and Asbestos Workers is oiih >inhteen thousand men, and that there are about the same number of non-union asbestos workers, his prediction has staggering implications. I R E C E N T L Y spent several days with Dr. Selikoff in the Environ mental Sciences Laboratory at Mount Sinai, where he lias assembled a team of thirty men and women to work on various aspects of the asbestos problem. The* rooms include laboratories for his tology, pathology, electron microscopy, chemistry, and mineralogy, and among the imposing array of equipment they contain is an electron microprobe that is capable of identifying particles of in finitesimal size. Dr. Sdikoff's office is large and modern. Its walls are lined with shelves and cabinets containing hundreds of bound volumes of research papers and reports on asbestos, and at one end are a large conference table and a blackboard. T he place gives an immediate impression of rather cold efficiency, but this is tempered to a great degree by the affability of the di rector. As we talked, Dr. Selikoff, a large, soft-spoken man in his early fifties, was frequently interrupted by telephone calls and by questions from staff members, but lu* generally re sumed-- ofteir with an enthusiastic " Where were ever"- and rattled off statistics about asbestos disease the way some baseball fanatics recite the batting averages of big-league ballplayers. On the day of my first visit, however, lie received a call from a doctor in New Jersey who informed him that a lung cancer had just been diagnosed in an other of the insulation workers. Dr. Selikoff told the physician that the pa tient's last X-rays showed moderate ashestosis, that lie had had more than twenty years of exposure, and that Insmoked a pack of cigarettes a day. When he hung up the plume, lu was visibly upset, and fell silent. A few moments later, he told me that lie had taken mole calls like that than he cared to remember. " I don't relish the role of Uassandra, hut I feel we've got to forge ahead on this problem as quickly as possible," lie said. " I here are about thirty -s;s thousand insulation wa ke rs--union and non-union---in the 3 EIE 30E ta -- Squire Style -- Matching Jackets | and Waistcoats Power Loom Irish Tweed $85 Handwoven j| Irish Tweed $90 Irish `Supersax' Hunting Checks $95 Tailored in Ireland Solely For i. PRESS in long center vent & steep side vented models with matching waistcoat. T R lo u c jh f in n DUBLIN NEW YORK SUTLER AND MANCIPLE TO THE SPORTING GENTRY IRISH TWEED HATS & CAPS *8 to *12w POR RACE WATCHING, HUNTING PISHING, STROLLING, GOLF, SKATING AND ALL FASHIONABLE SPORT EVENTS SEND FOR ORDER FORM AND PRICE LIST GRATIS ughfinn 520 FIFTH AVENUE, N.Y.C., N.Y. P ip e o f / P e a c e P.O. 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All in all, including as bestos-textile workers and people en gaged in manufacture. : other asbestos products, there arc u-'cibly more than a hundred thousand workers who are regularly and d c exposed. The hazard would -mis enough if this were the on!1, e -up at risk, hut it's ob vious that the problem i \tends further, simple because floating asbestos fibres do not respect job classifications. I)r. W il liam H. Stewart, who is the Surgeon General of the United States, told the House subcommittee that the asbestos- insulation workers are probably sharing their exposure to some extent with more than three and a half million other construction workers-- steam fit ters, electricians, welders, carpenters, ironworkers, plumbers, masons, tile set ters, and the like-- who are employed on the same projects, often in the same room or general area, and who there fore must be inhaling the same dusts." Because of their concern with the possible effects of such indirect occupa tional exposure, Dr. Selikoff and his assistants have spent months compiling the names, addresses, and work his tories of twelve hundred tile setters, three thousand roofing workers, and three thousand tunnel, foundation, and caisson workers in the New York metropolitan area. They plan to examine these men for possible health problems as the)- did the insulation workers, and to determine whether they have significant indirect occupa tional exposure, and, if they do, wheth er it is associated with risk of asbestos disease. " W e will study defined pop ulations that have been selected m terms of what appear to be diminishing levels of exposure to a known risk," D r. Selikoff told me. " It's as if a rock had been thrown into a pond and we're watching how far the ripples ex tend. Since the pond in our case is the general community, you can see how difficult the epidemiological detective work will be. If we discover, for ex ample, that the tile setters run a sig nificant risk of developing asbestos dis ease-- and there are some preliminary indications that they might-- then we must look into the question of fibre fall out from the .instruction sites where they're minim ed W e're not going to wait for n e res of the tile-setter stud), however, h u . s e the problem is too urgent. W e're entiating a whole cluster of studies designed to provide information on whether environmental asbestos pollution carries a risk for tin- general populate o. At the same time, by analyzing the ripples, we can deter mine which rocks thrown into the pond The b e a u tifu l lizards d a rtin g a lo n g with tweeds, furs, le a th e rs-- ours alone, N e w to n Elkin's pumps in brown, black or g re y with a twist of gilt metal. 38.00 Designer, shoe collections at all Lord & Taylor stores N E W YORK'S BELO VED A lg o n q u in Superb pre-theatre dining. . .nd [ust a stroll to yo ur theatre. 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One of D r. SelikofPs studies will ex amine the possible health problems arising from interrupted exposure by tracing thirteen hundred and sixtvseven men who worked at the asbestosinsulation plant in Paterson-- closed down in 195+-- where Dr. Selikoff's first seventeen patients were employed. Another will look into the matter of neighborhood exposure by tracing and investigating the health experience of seventy-five hundred people who lived within a half-mile radius of the plant in 1942. " The question .>t neighbor hood exposure was emphasized as a re sult of the mesotheliomas discovered 1>V Christopher W agner in South Afri ca, ami later by Molly Newhouse and Hilda Thompson in London and by Jan Lieben in Pennsylvania," Dr. Sehkoff told me. " Since current evi dence suggests that the tumor rarely occurs without a history of exposure to asbestos, epidemiologists consider it a `marker' disease, and we'll be looking for it when we trace the medical his tory of the people in Paterson. Inci dentally, there's one preliminary indi cation that leads us to suspect we tnav find it. in 1955, the proprirou m a junk yard next to the Paterson insui.i tion plant died of a pleural tumor." A third stud}' in Dr. Selikoff's cluster will aim at the protection of rela tives of asbestos workers. As in the case of neighborhood exposure, pre vious investigators of this group had no population base against which to meas ure the occurrence of the disease they discovered. Dr. Sehkoff, however, lias a definitely established croup to work with. It is composed of ih.- i - and children of all the insulate and their health problems u ,u V fully scrutinized, especially for era.: ;u . of mesothelioma. In Dr. Selikott's opin ion, this study will he of tremendous importance, became u- subjects have been far removed Inun direct exposure. " If the families of insulation wankers turn out to he in tumble, the implan tions will he vert s e i s m s indeed," InSaid. " On the other hand, if we find no trouble among tin in and tlm is my hope--w e'll he on safer grim-.d. O ur observations will also en.ml. u-. violets A perennial reminder of spring .. . violet plant abundant with oxidized green flowers and leaves, Hand crafted,in metal,and mounted on a wooden base. 1 2 " h gfi, 12" spread. $50. Add $1.00 for shipping outside regu lar delivery area.. an* ericaS Wi Shoouse THE FINEST tN 'AM ERlCAN CRAFTS 44W. S:3rd Sta N.Y. 10019 >ft-7-9494; At Kom elim e this w eek-take a iguiet w alk alo n g o u r ennui in Itueks I 'o u n tv . M id -w e ek is a wonderful time to siu y with us at [he 47-ttl llou.sr. early Am erieun inn overlnokirijr the livUvfArv U t V f . \U t O i yo u pel here, the 17 11) House will ffarteMi Memorably- lie V ivili 'AH YOU Itati hojXrtl it wtmlti he . . . tulio, _ f urr-{(un]it nnc<i rooms, each with hath ami terrace, 'wimming. fish.tiff, boating ami tennis. Hleii-m write for our brochure ami invimi directions. Then make rt servai ions for a refreshing, mid-week respite from cn-wds ami care*. . i.. i*.v. u n a a n r Tel: 21 5- 2 9 7 -5 6 6 1 EN JO YING STEAK AND LOBSTER IS T H E G R E A T IN D O O R S P O R T A T .. ALSCHACHT'S 10 E .5 2 N D ST., N.Y.C. PL 9-85 70 7 DA VS A W E E K T I L L 1 AYEM ocroeeiui, 19^8 to recommend whether special facilities should be provided so that insulation workers can change their work clothes before going home to their families." With the aid of a grant from the United States Public Health Service, Dr. Selikoff and his associates are cur rently conducting an investigation that covers an even wider range, by study ing samples of lung tissue from three thousand consecutive autopsies that have been performed at three different hospitals in New York City and trac ing the work histories of each of the dead people. So far, tbey|ia vecxamined two thousand lung samples, and have found asbestos bodies in nearly half of them. According to D r, Victor Baden, a histologist at th Envirrwffftcrttnl Sci ences Laboratory, from one to five or more asbestos bodies are found in fifty per cent o f the tissue slides he examines. Since each slide is composed of seven sections that together represent less than one half-mill>nth of an entire lung, and since it is widely assumed that asbestos bodies are evenly distrib uted throughout a lungi.'ll finding of just one of them can he projected to mean that half a miHion may be pres ent. D r. Selikoff and his fellow-epide miologists do not know whether the relatively small amount of asbestos now being inhaled by the general public car ries a risk of inducing mesothelioma, or whether the presence of what appear to be asbestos bodies in the lungs of many people in the general population repre sents a serious public-health problem. Nor do they know whether relatively light inhalation of asbestos is assuciated with a special lung-cancer risk in cigar ette smokers. " At present, we simply have no way of telling what the dosedisease relationships are," D r. Selikoff said. "Is it better to have breathed in only fifty asbestos fibres than fifty thousand or fifty million? Does each fibre have the potential of causing a cell with which it comes in contact to turn cancerous? The answers to these im mensely complicated questions will have to come from epidemiolog\ over ,i long period of time. An eightfold iucrcasc in asbestos production over the last thirtv years would appear to make it likely that asbestos cancers will increase, but only tile future will tell. Remember that current cases of mesothelioma most be associated with inhalation that took place twenty, thirty, or more yens ago, when world consumption of a-bestos was only about five burniti thousand tons a year, and that tie neoplasms associated with today 's pn , 1 , f..... ..'ll;,.., ..... DAISY Black or blue call with lizard trim $65 Classic, timeless styling. Brochure on request .G IA N blfOKri :i, St New York 10022 LADIES G IFT HANDKERCHIEF NIsrmwandiellawtdHtwt*itIhribsharlilmulnl nwaimthet(hor a3didnaitdia(lta)tnhiusrhaatnItfnkc*hrtwhiilli rth>eni-swhrnintkritraHmi*la$c1*3.lSrOnt FraWncr*it.*PtrarotrWee.TSGeifatchB.raScehxtwof*.threwol THE NEW YORKER year will not be evident until the nine teen-nineties. Moreover, we have found that all varieties of asbestos fibres appear to be implicated in meso thelioma, and not just crocidolite, as some of us had hoped following W ag ner's observations in South Africa. The problem would have been simple if only one variety of asbestos had been related to this tumor. Control proce dures could have been narrowly fo cussed. As it is, however, a control pro gram will have to be concerned with asbestos in general." I asked D r. Selikoff if he thought that asbestos air pollution' was respon sible for the occurrence of asbestos bodies in the lungs of people in the general population, and he replied that although there was relatively little direct confirmation* he felt it was at least partly responsible. Pointing out again that direct and indirect occupa tional exposure were much more com mon than had been suspected, especially in the construction, and shipbuilding industries, he went on to say, " The possible sources of environmental con tamination are numerous. Mining and milling operations, manufacturing processes, and the delivery and storage of finished products constitute just one part of it. T he constant use of asbestos materials in the construction industry is another, and the destruction and de terioration of asbestos products in the community at large constitutes a third. T here's no question in my mind that unsuspecting people are being exposed to small quantities of fibres from such sources as torn ironing-hoard covers and pot holders, and who knows how much asbestos is inhaled by hobbyists engaged in do-it-yourself p ro je c ts around the house---like sawing up wallhoard, mixing crack-filler compounds, insulating pipes with asbestos materials, and repairing furnaces and boilers with asbestos cements? I agree with those who suggest that small numbers of fi bres may be liberated from many prod ucts in widespread use, such as asbestoscement pipe and asbestos filters, which are employed in the food and pharma ceutical industries, but we have no in formation that this carries a diseasepotential. W hat troubles me is that relatively few people are aware of the fact that it can be dangerous to inhale asbestos. Not long ago, we discovered that children in a number of kinder gartens in New York, California, and other states were being allowed to mix raw asbestos with water to make a cheap form of play dough. W e have also lear ned that the powders in some children's cosmetics kits and in certain 161 Holidays are happy days in Germ any Germany has probably the most modern cities in Europe. But many old fashioned things like the well in the picture still persist. The Germans cling to the relics and re minders of the past-- their visitors are charmed by them. The old anc; the new stand side by side... contrasting, yet blending. But more important is the spirit of the cities and of the towns, villages, hamlets and resorts. This spirit, too, is a wonderful combi nation of old traditions and strong, vital contemporary ideas and thinking. It's in the air, as are music and song and the gay laughter of your friendly hosts, the Germans. Come to Germany where holidays are happy days. Send coupon for illustrated brochures. See Your T ravel Agent I----------------------------------------------------- -- -------------------------------------" 1 j GERMAN NATIONAL TOURIST OFFICE b j j 500 Fifth Avenue, New York 10036 323 Geary Street, San Francisco 94102 J j 11 S. LaSalle Street, C h ic ago 60603 1176 Sherbrooke Street W , Montreal, Can. j | Please send me free and postpaid illustrated travel brochures. j j N a m e ___________________________________________ J Street Address City & State_________________________________ ____?ip C o w _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 1 162 can when y.ou wears FAME de CORDA An imported French perfume. To 40.00 1967 PARFUMSCOROAY, INC. AVAtLA8Ct- INCANADA. powder-water-mix jewelry kits con tain asbestos In addition, within the past couple vd years two different thoracic surgeons have published ar ticles in leading medical journals which advocate the sprinkling of asbestos on surgical uu m in order to pro mote the adhesion and healing of tissue. This is very bad advice. W hy, I)r. William E. Smith, who con ducts animal studies at Fairletgh Dick inson University, has readily induced mesotheliomas in hamsters by injec tions of asbestos fibres into their pleural cavities!" D r. Selikoff w ent on to say that he understands full well that asbestos is an extremely valuable material, and that it has become essential in modern industrial society'. "W e epidemiologists recognize and study its dangers so that we may devise ways of minimizing or avoiding them," he said. " Improve ments in the practice of industrial hy giene are needed to eliminate unneces sary exposure among ashes* Workers and men in other building trades, and awareness of the potential risks of en vironmental contamination is needed until our studies indicate just how far out into the general population the problem extends. AH I can say is that the public should be made aware of the problem, and that no one, particularly children and young people, should be unduly exposed. After all, today's chil d re n are almost certainly inhaling more asbestos than their parents did, and we now know that if a person inhale sig nificant amounts of asbestos dust, he carries a burden that will provide a la tent potential for the development of cancer for the rest of his life. Here's an example I 'll never forget. A couple of years ago, just after Cuyler Hammond, Jack Churg, and I published an article about asbestos and mesothelioma in the N ew England Journal of Medicine, 1 received a phone call from a doctor in Massachusetts who said that when he read the piece he immediately told his forty-three-year-old wife about it, be cause her sister had died of mesothelio ma the year before. `Imagine my hor ror,' this physician went on, `when my wife proceeded to tell me that in 1943, while she and her sister were students in college, they had responded to a pa triotic appeal and spent weeks in a shipyard insulating pipe- in destroyer escorts.' " Dr. Selikoff paused. " I wo sisters with six weeks of exposure in 1943," lie murmured. " Twenty-three t ears later, one of them lies of meso thelioma. And ti>da\ , the other one-- the doctor's wife-- is tving examined every few months to keep track of OCTOBER 12, 1944,. Demi-lune handles of gilded metal dress this handsome small bag by Blo ck: bl ack or brown leather or plastic patent, or in black alligatorgrain leather. 30.00 At all Lord & Taylor stores O ne of the 7 Wonderful Inns of the world! Luxurious accommodations for 00 Year 'round resort activities Write for Color Brochure & Weekend Plans Route 38 at Haddonfield Rd. 15 min. from downtown Phila. N.J. Tu npike Exit 4 Cherry Hill, N.J. Reservations: (609) NO 2-7200 Currently Appearing BOBBY SHORT Complete Dinner $6.50 served to 9 p.m*.i Entertainment from 9 p.m. to 2 u.m. Cover $3 p.p. Minimum $3 p.p. H O T E L CRLYLIS rm M A D I S O N A V E. A T 7 T H ST . n e w v o R K > r e u -t-ujo THE NEW YORKER sonic sus|iicious-lookiiic :ows on her X-rays." ..f-.4 l AS I was ;inr.Snii the Enviroiii A mental Sca mux 1 uhoratorv one (lay, I happened in notice a newspaper clipping tacked up on a hulletin hoard near the entrance. The story, which was from the / Am' of September 2, 1967, started out as follows: " The scene looked wintn on Madison Ave nue, between 5 7th and 58th Streets, yesterday. Flurries of what seemed to he snowflakes fell on the area from between the 25th and 30th floors of the General Motors Building, which is nearing completion on the site of the former Savoy Plaza Hotel." The article went on to say that residents of the neighborhood had complained to the contractor, and that one of the project engineers had explained that the white flakes were fallout from fireproofing material that was being sprayed on the structural steel girders, beams, and decks of the fifty-story skyscraper. According to the Times, the engineer would not identify the in sulating material, which was being ap plied with spray guns, " because I don't want to read newspaper stories about how we are messing up city streets." He was also quoted as saying, " This is a job condition all over the city." T he last paragraph of the article read, "The city's Buildings Department said that it had not received any complaints about the Madison Avenue `snowfall.' T he department said the use of tar paulins was required for spraying op erations in construction work to pre vent inconvenience to neighborhoods." Beneath the article was this typed notation: " Examined in our laboratory', the material was found to contain amorphous glass fibres (presumably `rock woo!'), and chrysotile ashestos. It is known that other sprayed insula tion materials contain amosite asbestos plus rock Wool, while still others con tain asbestos fibres alone." W hen I asked Dr. Selikoff about the bulletin-board items, he said that the nvneralngpst in the laboratory, Dr. Ar thur M. Danger, had collected a sam ple of the material and identified its contents by means of electron diffrac tion and electron microscopy, and with the aid of the electron microprobe. T hen he went to a shelf and took down a small glass jar that contained a grayish wad of fibrous-looking stuff, about the size of a half dollar. " '1 his is the snrnpl* f)r. Danger brought back and analv/iO." lie told tnc. " It comes from a type >! insulation material that is about twi n?'.-bvi per cent ashestos, CARMFSCFl ! F lU P U S i. if children. Fat. blind. Ftutble suspect. Hush o n ly occasioi 812.82 per nu p ig -s ty is woo by flattened Hole in roof se ture. Fete hit aginable prtn gry, ragged.Pii cannot feed, a dren adequai cita m eans In Thousands of eh anxiously await "a< Choose a hoy or g: Viet Nam, Hong I Colombia, Ecuadu grant helps proviih your Foster Child In addition, PLAN cal care when en clothing and ho emphasis on edur come self-supporting citizens. Since 1937, more than 110,000 el PLAN'S program. You receive a case history and photograph. Em a letter (original and translation). These letters will tell you the entire family. Soon, through the regular letters am! PLAN child develop a warm, loving relationship. CHECK YOUR CHARITY! W e eagerly offer our financial sto see that your contribution truly benefits the child for whom it PLAN is a non-political, non-profit, non-sectarian, indepeiulor under No. VFA019 with the Advisory Committee on Voluntary International Development* Tcste/tB^tenisTM | : 352 PARK AVENUE SOUTH, NEW YORK, N Y. P A R T IA L LIST O F SPONSORS AND FOSTER PARENTS Steve AWee Julie A n dre w s Sen. Pool H. D ovglos Helen H ayes C o n r a d N . Hilton Sen. Jacob K. JavltS A Art tinldetter Amfe, M r*. Henry Cabot Lodge G arry Moore Sen. W illiam Proxmire Dr. H o w ard A. Rusk Mr. & Mrs. Robert W . Sarnoff G ov. & Mrs. W illiam W . Scronton Sen. John G. Tower FOSTER PARENTS PLAN, It 3 5 2 P A R K AVENUE S O U T H , N E W V> In Canada: P .O . B o x 6 5 , S ia . B, M a u i A. 1 wish to become a Poster Ponhnr oi H possible, sex. o g e ....... 1 will p a y $ 1 6 a month for one yeoi Paym ent will b e monthly ( ), quarii n-molly ( ). 1 enclose herewith m y first paym ent B. 1 cannot " a d o p t " a child but 1 wov t ............. N a m e . ................ ......................- .. A d d r e s s ........... .......... C i t y . ............................................. D a t e . ............ ............................ OCTOBER U , 194 8 and in this tiny wad alone there are literally billions of fibres. Of course, the `snowfall' those people saw and complained about was not what may have been hazardous. What may have been hazardous was what they couldn't see---an untold number o f *uh-micro seopic and highly respirable [-articles. The `snowfall' was a perfect ex ample of how asbestos gets into the ambient air, and that engineer was right when he said it's a job condition all over the city. You'll see die same material floating down from many other building projects in town. It's sprayed on by men in the Plasterers and Cement Masons Union. Inciden tally, as far as I know, no one has ever made a study of their jwalth." It was a blustery day, fitted with in timations of the season's changing, and when I left the hospital I took a Fifth Avenue bus downtown. I sat by w in dow, and was looking idly out at peo ple strolling along the sWrwafb when the bus came to a stop in the upper Forties beside a dump truck parked in front of a small office building that was being gutted. Several workmen were carrying canvas sacks of refuse across die sidewalk and heaving them up to a tall, wett-buik Negro who stood in the rear of the truck, emptying the sacks at his feet. As be dki, clouds of dust rose into the air around him. Soine of it showerid tile window beside me. It ap pealed to be ordinary cement dust, but then I saw that die pile d M r s on which the man was standing coittained broken pieces of acoustical panelling and walfbosrd, both of which often contain asbestos, and lengths of pipe coated with crumbling white insulation material that looked very much like asbestos. W hen I got off the bus, I walked west along Forty-fourth Street. Half way down the block, I saw two work men slide a large rectangular container from a pickup truck and carry it into a building. Tile container was full of white powder, some of which was be ing blown away by the wind, and the men's clothes were covered with white dust. When T looked into the truck, I saw half a dozen large paper sicks la belled " Fireproof Pla-.tr i O n e of the workmen returned for his tools, and I asked him if tin- pE-tcr contained as bestos. "Sure," in replied. "T h a t's what makes it fircpr->uf." I walked on to the corner of Sixth Avenue, where a tortv-hr-story office building had been under construction for several months. During that period, I had passed the building nearly every day, but now, for the first time, I t h is charming fountain in lead will m akea love ly addition to any terrace or in form al ga r den setting. Com plete with re circu latin g pum p available in oxidized lead [ patina or PomI peian green fin ish. f l " high. 2 0 ' diam eter shell. $375.00 F.O.B. New York City. Se n d 25y in stam p or coins for 40 page Catalogue illustrating m any other com plete fountains and garden ornaments. S'LORENT1NE C R A FT SM E N 650654 RRST AVE. (37th St.) MEWYORK, N.Y. 10016 Phone LExington 2-3926 POUND RIDGE, N. V. H N N J HrmI tvM (4 American Food and Cocktails M erritt Parkway, exit 35, north on 137, o r R oute 22 to Bedford Village. J v U n F. Shm w t Pram. C IO S MONDAYS P o u n d R ldfte 4-5779 V ISIT O U R WALK IN W INE CELLAR ABBE LANE sets the world on desire from October 2 -October 22 Performances at 9:t5 & 12:15 'Jor reseroations call Paza 9-3000 PERSIAN Ad' THE PLA ZA V THE NEW YORKER looked up and scrutinized it carefully. About halfway up its side, ! saw some tarpaulins billowing in the wind. Above the tarpaulins, the steel girders and beams were reddish brown; between the tarpaulins and the ground, however, they had been sprayed with asbestos in sulation, which clung to them like gray frosting. Then, all at once, I saw wads of the same gray stuff falling out of the area that had been curtained off by the tarpaulins. Some of the pieces were car ried away on the wind; others that were heavier came tumbling down around me, One fell on the sidewalk at my feet. I picked it up, crumbled it be tween my fingers, and saw dozens of tiny fibres float away. I t was the same color and texture as the material that D r. Selikoff had shown me half an hour before. T he sidewalk was covered ' with it, and even as I stood there more of it came showering down. A woman hurrying to make the light with a friend brushed some off the sleeve of her coat, and said, " W hat the devil is this stuff?" I watched her cross the avenue, and saw asbestos insulation blowing over the pavement like thistle down across a field. T h e wind was southerly, and most of the asbestos was travelling north, in the direction o f ; M ount Sinai Hospital, where D r. Seli S T . T H O M A S a. rnomts im,, si. room e m , otovjna, n.r. Th eomtmct eatry-all. Ramty Jo work with a r checkt; hoMer, 8* frame coin pocket, ana pocket. A -section vinyl card holder takes ein else. A swarm of hooey kid colors, about $12.! At Himelh rch Bros. A Co., Detroit; Frost Bros., B. Altman & Co., New York City end all brand and all other fine store#. koff and his associates are still follow ing the trail Dr. Cooke set out on in 1924. But I was not thinking about D r. Selikoff or the difficulties of epi demiology just then, I was thinking about the children who play in Central Park every day, and about all the other children who live in this city and breathe its air. -- Paul Brodeur * VA"-*V f h f * . ,,e CRIES WE DOUBT EVER GOT CRIED OUT, RAPTURE OR NO RAPTURE [from the St. Moritz Courier] When GioVANNi sbgantini first came up to the Engadinc from Lake Como, he cried out, full of rapture : "1 bow before this earth which is hal lowed by beauty; I kiss the grasses and the flowers under this blue vault of heav en, and while the birds sing and meet to gether for flight and the bees suck honey from the open blooms, I drink at these pure springs, where beauty is ever re newed, where love is renewed that gives life to all things." Western observers believed Brezhnev's remarks would aid anti-American propa ganda abroad while leaving the Krem lin free to deal with almost any future American President, except possibly Rich ard Nivox.-- i f a sh in g t o n P o st. " T' ' ----- M,,,i, Nivnv of pi - H# a.'.. -'; -1 i Ii s / 'jfttP P I ''> . f<n'f 't . 'b m u . . . " i i X A' \ i M Two confident candidates from our exciting collection of original pan deriguitT ' rtontev about S17.50.At fine stores. OnerJewelers, 20 West 37th St, N- *hi j