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The New Wedding The Daily Press Exposed An Asbestos Town Struggles With a Killer chev BB 011138 1(0.1 AsU^s r' Asbestos, long known as a life saver, is now recognized as the leading industrial cause of cancer. ; As company towns go, Manville, New Jersey (population: 15,000), has much to be thankful for. Besides deriving its livelihood from the 2,225 jobs pro vided by the Johns-Manville Company --the nation's largest manufacturer of asbestos products--the town enjoys a number of fringe benefits. In the late 1950s Johns-Manville donated $100,000 for a high school building. Over the past three years it has given another $100,000 to Somerset Hospital in nearby Somerville. The company lias alto picked up tlie bill for u large part of Munville's $ 125,000 worth of ambulance and rescue vehicles, and it has donated some $250,000 worth of pipe for the town's new sewage system. Towu gar bage is dumped at the company's refuse site, a service worth another $100,000 a year. On a smaller scale the company is an easy touch for everything from building materials for the new Veterans Bruce Porter, who specializes in writing about environmental subjects, teaches journalism at Brooklyn College. For merly he was Newsweek s urban affairs editor. BY BRUCE PORTER of Foreign Wan hall to the $10,000 needed for beer and hot dogs at the annual volunteer firemen's picnic. But now, it tarns out, Manville citi zens have been paying a high price for such largess. The incidence of lung cancer among Johns-Manville employees is four times the national norm. Meso thelioma--a form of chest or abdominal cancer that accounts fur only one out of every 10,000 deatlis in the general population--has in the last eight years claimed the lives of at least fifty-eight Manville residents, most of them work ers in the Johns-Manville plant. Asbestosis, or "white lung"---a severe scarring of the lungs caused by inhaling as bestos fibers over the course of many years--is another disease that plagues the company towu. Beginning as a mere shortness of breath, asbestosis develops into a near paralysis that makes breath ing and bodily movement increasingly difficult. In the end the victim's lungs function so marginally that, if the in dividual does not suiter death from respiratory illnesses such as pneumonia. he will eventually suffocate. One Manville resident who is only too well acquainted with asbestosis is George Smith--"Smitty" to his friends --who moved to New Jersey twenty years ago from a Pennsylvania steel town. He was thirty-nine years old at the time, and he was active and healthy. "I was always off hunting or fishiug," Smitty told me. "I couldn't stand not to be doing something, yoi) know." A year ago last fall, after seventeen years of making asbestos-lined sewer pipe in the Johns-Manville factory, Suiitty came down with asliestosis. "I didn't know what the hell it was," he recalled. ""It was just a little shortness of breath, you know, and I'd always been as healthy as a horse all my life. The last doctor I'd seen was when I was boro. At first I thought it was just something that would pass, but then it started getting worse and worse, until one day 1 eume to work and I could barely move. I didn't think l`d malTe it through the day." Smitty is now virtually immobile. Unable to work, he sits all day in the kitchen of the j & j Delicatessen across CHEV BB 011139 George Smith, a victim of asbestosis: "God help the man who ties up with anything like this!' the street from the plant. At night Smitty hobbles back to his room above Mary's Tavern--a one-block journey that takes him nearly twenty minutes because he must stop to catch his breath every three steps. His body is thin and frail, and when he talks the words rattle out of his mouth in a series of hoarse l)e!ches. "Even if my friends would take me, I don't think I could fish anymore, because if I got a bite 1 couldn't do anything about it," Siniltv said. "I'm finished. I can't work. 1 can't do anything. God help the man who ties up with anything like this." While the effects of asbestos-related diseases are, in themselves, fearful the prospect of the toll they may take m Nlanville in the near future is even more so. In the next few years, physicians who have studied the problem predict, the number of deaths resulting from as bestos-related diseases can be expected to reach near-epidemic proportions. This is so because the gestation period for asbestosis and mesothelioma ranges between twenty and forty years. Hence, workers who joined the plant m the late 1930s and 1940s are just now be ginning to suffer the consequences. A. study of 689 Johns-Manville employees that was released last May showed that out of seventy men and women who had worked at least twenty years, in the plant's formerly very dusty tex tile division, some twenty-four of them, or 34 per cent, had died. This death rate is nearly triple that of a similar .group in the general population. "The next five or ten years are going to be rough in Manville." I was told by Dr. Irving J. Selikoff, director of the Environmental Sciences Lalwratory at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and the scientist who conducted the study, "because a lot of people are going to be dying, and so far no one knows what to do about it." Dr. Selikoff adds: "What is tragic is that this is a man-made disease. It is not a visitation from heaven. It was preventable. The se rious situation that now exists is a rec ord of failure on the part of us all-- scientists, industry, and governmental authority. And industry is correct, in my opinion, in pointing out that what we're seeing now is a remit of our mistakes in the past. Having said this, I would urge the most intense efforts to ensure that we do not continue to make these mistakes. Too many men and women have died of our blunders already." Perhaps no other mineral is so woven into die fabric of American life as is asbestos. Impervious to heat and fibrous --it is the only mineral that can be woven into cloth--asbestos Is spun into fireproof clothing and theater curtains, as well as into such household items as noncombustible drapes, rugs, pot hold ers, and inming-lioard covers. Mixed into slurry, asliestos is sprayed onto girders and walls to provide new build ings with fireproof insulation. It is used in floor tiles, roofing felts, and in most plasterboards and walllroards. Asbestos is also an ingredient nf plaster and stuc-- co and of many paints and putties. This "mineral of a thousand uses"--an ohso-' lete nickname: the present count stands at around 3,000 uses--is probably pres ent in some form or other in every home, school, office building, and factory in the country. Used in brake linings and clutch facings, in mufflers and gaskets, in sealants and caulking, and extensive- CHEV BB 011140 27 Open spraying of asbestos on construction sites has only recently been banned in some Eastern cities. ly used in ships, asbestos is also a com ponent of every modem vehicle, includ ing space ships. . An estimated five million people-- men and women employed in asbestos plants, insulation workers, construction workers, steamfitten, `carpenters, tile setters, and the like--daily breathe in significant amounts of asbestos fibers. During World War II some 4.5 million Americans worked in the shipbuilding industry and were thus occupationally exposed to asbestos fibers. An estimated 3.25 million of these people are still alive. Medical scientists fear that the Seventies will bring the first big wave of asliestos-induced cancers among this segment of the population. In a study published last March in the Journal of the National Cancer In stitute, Dr. Merle F. Stanton, a scien tist at the National Institutes of Health, ranked asbestos second only to cigarette smoke among the known causes of cancer. Dr. Stantons study points up the fact that asbestos fibers pose a threat to the health of the gen eral public. It is a threat that most cities and towns and federal agencies, like most asbestos-products manufactur ers, have been slow to recognize and slow to respond to. For years the sight of flurries of asbestos fibers floating down from construction sites was com monplace in American cities and towns. It was not until February of last year that New York City banned, outright, the use of asbestos in sprays used to fire proof buildings. And New York was a leader in this field. (Last December the Environmental Protection Agency--fol lowing the example set by New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and the state of Illinois--took the first legal steps to ward banning construction site spray ing and "the visible emission of asbestos particulate matter" during repair and demolition of buildings throughout the nation.) How many New Yorkers were breathing the stuff in? Two years ago Dr. Selikoff and his associates at Mount Sinai studied lung tissues from 3,000 consecutive autopsies performed at three different New York hospitals; they found traces of asbestos in 48.3 per cent of them. The air in New York may not lie typical of that in other cities, but the statistics stand as a warning. The fibers to which the general pub lic may be exposed do not come only in visible blizzards or invisible swirls in big cities. Each time a car mechanic airhoses out a brake housing, he spreads asbestos fibers through his garage. Each time a do-it-yourself or professional carpenter saws up wallboara or plaster board containing asbestos, he releases fibers mto the air. So ubiquitous is asbestos that one tends to forget it is there at all. Last hill the New York City Department of Air Re sources tested several brands of pow dery papier-mache mix widely used in elementary school, and found that some samples contained 50 per cent or more asbestos. The United States is the worlds fore most consumer of asbestos. In the span of yean from 1965 to 1969 American manufacturers purchased almost one- third of the world's output of as bestos--an average of 8CKJ.000 tons per year. Johns-Manvifle is the giant of Americas booming, $1-billion asbestos manufacturing business. According to Matt Swetonic, secretary of the Asbes tos Information Association, an industryfunded data distribution center with headquarters in New York City, JohtisManville manufactures between 35 and 40 per cent of the nation's asbestos fiber. In 1971 the $700-millkm corpora tion netted $42.7 million; last year it netted $55 million. Of the country's 400 asbestos-products plants, which em- filay a total of 31,000 men and women, ohns-Manvillc owns fifty-five, the largest of its plants being the one in Munville, New Jersey. (In 1912 Henry W. Johns, Jr. and Tliomas F. Manville established their first asbestos-products plant in what was then called the town ship of Hillsborough. Soon the plant was receiving so much freight addressed to Johns-Manvifle that railroad men nick named tile place Manville. In 1929 this name was formally adopted by the com pany town.) Located some forty miles southwest of New York, Manville is a plain, pre dominantly Polish-American town built out on eitlier side of a long main street punctuated by a single trafficlight. Most of the houses that line the side streets are post-Workl War II bun galows and Cape Codders, each with its small front lawn and Iiackyard. The tall factory stack and the sprawling complex of dingy old and spanking new buildings of the Johns-Manvifle plant dominate the scene. I went to Manville, not because the asliestos plant there was Johns-Maiiville's biggest and longest established, but because tiie town's Working popula tion had been studied more closely than that of any other asbestos company town. I went also because I had read about tire conditions that liad long prevailed at the Manville plant, and which had been shown to lie the cause of the local plague, aiid because 1 had heard of new policies tluit promised great, if late, improvement in those con ditions. I saw Manville, New Jersey as a laboratory in which to study the phe nomenon of a group of businessmen and industrial wutkers trying to cope with the painful discovery that their long-cherished means of livelihood has a lethal side to it. It is a phenomenon that, I suspect, lurs occurred, and will repeat edly occur, in the course of this century in which industrial progress always seems to outstrip man's knowledge of the full human consequences of such progress. For, once on the move, in dustry is usually too preoccupied to pause, look buck, and help out. Evidence that asbestos fibers cause lung damage was on hand even before Johns and Munville Started up oper ations in New Jersey. But, as Paul Brodeur observed in "The Magic Mineral," an article published in The New Yorker in 1968. "coyucss on the part of indus try, timidity on tiie part of labor, and obtusencss on the part of the medical profession often combined to make early investigations into tlte health of asliestos 28 CHEV BB 011141 An electron microscope reveals asbestos fibrils found in the air of an asbestos worker's home. workers meaningless." Then, it) 1928 wul 1929, the iTiief medical inspector of tire British Home Office's factory de partment examiner! 363 axlicstos-textile workers and fonnd that mare titan 25 per cent of them shower! evidence of suffering from asbestosis. In 1931, oil the basis of the inspector's findings. Par liament made the disease compensable and. among other measures, instituted periodical checkups for workers engaged in particularly hazardous processes hi the industry. Next, in 1955, Dr. Rich ard S. Doll, director of the Statistical Research Unit of the British Medical Research Council, completed a study of 113 consecutive autopsies of men who had Iieen occupationally exposed to asbestos for more than twenty years. Doll's study showed that the extent to which they had risked lung cancer over the whole period was eleven times as great as that of men m the genera! pop ulation of England and Wales. Hrodcur oliscrvcs in his pioneering article m this subject: "From then on, many doctors were convinced that a causal re lationship Iietwcen asbestos exposure and lung cancer had been demonstrat ed, although almost no part of the vast asliestos industry either acknowledged (lie relationship or found it advisable to aid tlie independent researchers who were investigating it." Tlie health hazard ixwii! hy asliestos euinc home to Maiiviflc in 1963, when Dr. Maxwell Borow, a local physician, found that seventeen townsmen had died, of mesothelioma within the span of three years. Four years later Borowasked Johns-Manville for $3,000 to finance a display to educate both work ers anti the medical profession at large on asbestos-related diseases; his re quest was turned down. Borow sub sequently approached the workers' I'tiion, Local 800 of the United Papermakers and Paperworkers; the union organized the collection of the needed money. Why had Johns-Manville declined to help out? "It was our opinion," Jack Solon, the coqx)ration's vice-president in charge of environmental affairs, ex-' plained to me. "that in 1967 there was a need to learn more about mesotheli oma before a relationship with asbestos could, be affirmed or denied." Besides, Solon added, since 1950 the company had already spent some $2 to 93 million on new dust-control equipment and, as a result, considered the ManviDe plant a safe place to work in. Men and women who worked at the plant m the Fifties oml Sixties, however, failed to notire that the new equipment made any ap preciable difference. "There were times when the air was so thick with asbestos dust in some places that you couldn't even see," I was told l>v a textile divi sion worker wlxi lias Iieen with tlie com pany fur thirty-two years. "Sometimes it wux even impossible to hrratlie with a respirator because the fillits wmihl get so ekigged with aslxsslox." (Respirators are gcnerallv unpopular among asliestos workers. The wearer sweats and his eyes smart. For workers who have car diac or pulmonary problems, breathing thnxigh an ordinary respirator adds to the- strain on their lungs and heart. Air-cooled respirators that supply air to the wearer are bulky and costly.) Even outside the factory the air was frequently full of the potentially deadly fillers. In the Lost Valley section of town--an area downwind from the fac tory--the fiber fallout, would get so thick that homeowners had to hose tlie stuff off tlieir houses. Directly in front of the plant conditions were even worse. "When Fd direct traffic there," Sgt. George Kalman of the ManviJle police recalled, "there were days when it was like we were having snow flurries in July. I'd take off my hat, and it would be covered with this white dust" Meanwhile, examinations by com pany doctors were carried out only once every two years--a schedule that was increased to once a year in 1972. Such infrequent checkups may have Iieen suf ficient to monitor a slowly developing case of asbestosis, but they were less useful as a means of catching a 'victim of a swiftly developing cancer, partic ularly mesothelioma, a disease that nor mally proves fatal six months to a vear after the cancer shows up in X-ray'pic tures. (To jump from past decades to an illustration from the recent past: in December 1971 Dnuny Macilxirski, a forty-nme-ycar okl ex-marine wlxi had worked for Johns-Manville for thir ty years, checked in at the company dispensary for his biennial physical and was given a clean bill of health. A few weeks later, however, he felt a strange sensation in his abdomen--as if his stomach were "getting bigger," as he put it--and went to see a private phy sician, who in turn sent him to Dr. Borow. Borow's tests showed that Maciborski hnd a malignant tumor of the membrane that lines the alxlmniiial cavity--in other words, mesothelioma. "I knew what it was because everylxxlv at the plant knows about asbestosis and mesothelioma now," Maeiborski told a reporter for the New York Pun. "1 Wasn't surprised or shocked alxmt it .... I just asked [Dr. Borow], 'How long have 1 gotF" Macilxirski diet! last Septemlx-r. lie lasted as king as lx* did liecausc he was willing to go to the doctor every two weeks to have up to eight quart's of fluid pumped out of liis alxlomen. Johns-Manville paid Maciborski's medi cal expenses, and, as provided by New Jersey state compensation laws, it is paying his widow 976 a week--a sum that will drop to 972 this June, when her eldest son will tum eighteen.) Why, throughout the Fifties and Six ties, (lid men and women continue to work in the plant if conditions were so hazardous? The answer would seem to have as much to do with psychology as with economics. "It's funny." says Ches ter Raczkowski, a forty-one-year-old machinist and union shop steward at the plant, "hut the only people wlxi seem scared of this stuff come from out side the-community." To Raczkowski. who has worked at the plant since he was eighteen, his job is a way of life that he is not about to give up just be cause of a few "scare stories" in the press. "You and I can work in a place for thirty-five years, and maybe you get CHEV 29 An asbestos-induced mesothelioma may take up to forty years to develop. Here, an X-ray photograph of normal lungs. cancer or something and I.don't--who's to say? Dr. Borow says he's an expert an this mesothelioma or whatever it's called. How do I know? Maybe I'm fatalistic, hut I'm u Catholic, and I figure you die when it's time to die." One thing ltaczkowski' does know is tluit he would find it difficult to leave his job at the Johns-Manville plant. As a first-class machinist, he earns $4.25 an hour, has a five-week vacation, and is entitled to a generous hospitalization program. "Wliere else could I get all these benefits?" Rackowski asks. Raczkowski's attitude--fatalism mixed with a sense of being pretty well off where he is--is one shared by the town's officials, most of whom work at the plant, too. Manvilles mayor is a factory supervisor. A majority of the members of the local board of health, whose duties include seeing to it that the town's air is fit to breatne, are also employed by Johns-Manville. Last spring.' when the town belatedly de cided to ascertain whether asbestos fibers were still sifting down on Manville, it seemed only natural that the board should ask the company to do the monitoring. The air was found clean. Indeed, bv 1972 Johns-Manville hod taken a series of steps to clean up its factory, "thereby improving the quality of the town's air. Much of the impetus for improvement came in the form of a 158-day strike in the winter of 1969-: 70. The main issues involved in the strike included such conventional items as overtime pay and job security, but it wasn't until the union brought the issue of health into the talks that it found real clout. "It was then," I was told by Wilbur Ruff, former plant man ager at Manville and now die factory's director' of community and employee relations, "that they started getting a lot of sympathy in the press." Finally, the company agreed to admit union representatives to the plant's environ mental committee, thus allowing them to examine filler counts made in the factory, and to let workers see their own company-kept health records. Two powerful nudges, felt bv the entire industry, came later in 1970 and in 1971. In December 1970 Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which established the Na tional Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (niosu), a body charged 30 with conducting environmental and medical research necessary to develop safe industrial standards, and empow ered the Labor Department's'Occupa tional Safety and Health Administra tion (osha) to promulgate and enforce these standards. Shortly after the act became effective,'in April 1971, Local 800 in Manville filed a complaint which brought inspectors in. Violations were found and citations issued. Then, in November 1971, under the provisions of the newly effective act, the industrial union department of the afl-cxo requested then-Secretary of Labor James Hodgson to promulgate emergency standards for asbestos dust and lower the acceptable fiber count from five so-called long fibers per cubic centimeter of air to two. (A tong fiber is one greater than five microns in length.) The afl-cio request claimed that five million American workers were being exposed to increasingly dense concentrations of airborne asbestos fi bers and that the situation called for prompt action. Hodgson took his time. Early in 1972 he appointed an Advi sory Committee on Asliestos Dust and hired Arthur D. Little, Inc., a consult ing firm with a lilieral reputation, to rovide advice on the economic feasiility of lowering the filler count. (Arthur D. Little, Inc., assembled a braintrust consisting of thirteen ex ecutives from the shipbuilding indus try, twelve executives from the asbestos industry, and eleven doctors, most of whom had previously served as con sultants to the asbestos industry.) Meanwhile mojh put together a spe cial advisory group of medical research ers to look into the fiber-count problem. Both the Hodgson-appointed Advisory Committee on Asbestos Dust and the niosh panel recommended lowering the count to two fibers. The Arthur D. Lit tle panel, on the other hand, concluded that the five-fiber count was safe and that bringing the count down would be prohibitively expensive for all indus trialists concerned. Then, in June, four days were set aside for public hearings at the Labor Department's offices in Washington, D.C. Predictably, Dr. Sefflcoff argued for the lowest possible count. (So, too, in the last few months of his life, did Danny Madborski, whose appearance at the hearings one Johns-Manville of ficial I talked to referred to as having been "in bad taste.") Dr. Selikoff point ed out that, while researchers know that a worker must be exposed to large doses of asbestos dust before he con tracts asbestosis, they also know that considerably less exposure can cause mesothelioma. (As far bapk as the early 1960s medical researchers in such farflung parts of the world as Johannes burg, London, and Pittsburgh were coming up with reports on large num bers of mesothelioma victims who had had no direct occupational exposure to asbestos: wives of asbestos workers who had inhaled fibers when slinking out their husbands' work clothes, people who laid simply lived within half a mile of an asbestos factory, a fourteen-vear-old boy whose only con tact with the fillers occurred wiieti he helped his father saw and install plaster board.) Lowering the fiber count would reduce the incidence of usliestosis, then, but it would not necessarily solve the problem of asliestos-reluted cancers. On this point, Selikoff was able to cite evi dence from his just completed study of the 689 Manville workers. It demon strated that, under usual factor)- con ditions, as the incidence of asbestosis declines the incidence Of cancer rises. In bis survey of workers in the formerly higli-fiber-cmuit textile division, for in stance, Selikoff found that 39 per cent of the workers' deaths resulted from asliestosis, 24 per cent from various types of cancer, whereas in areas where the fibercount was comparatively low (though not as low as counts recently achieved CHEV BB 011143 Once active, mesothelioma spreads swiftly. This X-ray photograph shows a lung covered with cancerous growth. at tlic Manville plant), such as the com pany's research lalxiratorv nr its main tenance shop, cancer accounted for 40 per cent of the workers' deaths, asbest- osis for approximately 5 per cent. ("What was happening." I was told by Dr. William ]. Nidtolson. an associate of Sclikoifs at Mount Sinai, "was tlmt, without asliestosis. these people lived kmger. which gave them time to die from cancer, also caused liv asl>estos.") A second point made 1>y SelikofF was that the monitoring techniques used to ascertain tire Hirer count set by the De partment of Lalxir record only long fi llers. altliough shorter filxrrs arc equally capable of causing cancer. Moreover, in a cubic-centimeter sample of air con taining tlie admissable count of five long fillers there may be ten to 100 times os many short fibers. -And it is tliese uncounted ones tliat remain in tlx- air the longest. (In a recent con versation I asked Dr. SelikofF what these figures meant in terms of the numbers of fibers an asbestos worker can lie asked to breathe in the course of an eight-hour work day. Each of us respires approximately one million cubic centimeters of air in an hour, he ex plained. Thus, in eight hours men and women assigned to sections of an asbes tos plant where the five-fiber count ob tains respire some forty million fibers. If the so-called short fibers are taken into account, the number of fibers respired daily rises to around four billion.) . While Dr. SelikofF and other medical researchers stressed health factors at the Labor Department hearing, asbestos in dustry spokesmen emphasized economic considerations. Henry B. Moreno, JohnsManville's senior operating vice-pres ident. asserted that to achieve a two-filier-coimt level in all of its asbestos fac tories would cost alxiut 512 million in capital expenditures, plus snme 55 mil lion in additional operating expenses each vear. This would mean, he said, that the company would simply have to close down the dustier operations in the Manville plant and fire 800 employees --all but killing off the economic life of the town. Nor, he argued, would the effects of a two-fiber standard stop there. Other asbestos companies would be forced to lay off workers; they would have to begin buying asbestos materials From abroad. "It is obvious," said Mo reno, "that the overall effect of lowering the present [standard] to two fibers per cc. would have a very substantial effect on our nations economy." In July Hodgson--rebuffing both his Advisory Committee on Asbestos Dust and the niosh panel--agreed to allow the exposure standard to remain at five fibers for four more years; only in 1976 would the standard be lowered to the safer-sounding count of two fibers. Johns-Manville welcomed Hodgson's decision. "The new occupational health standard for asbestos issued today," declared a company notice to stock holders, which came out the same day as the Labor Secretary's decision, "will have no tangible effect on sales and earnings of Johns-Manville Corpora tion." The release went on to say dust between now and the department's 1976 deadline company officials would have to study the "economics and over all profitability" of the Manville opern- Asbestos Fiber Countdown The chart below shows percentages ol as bestos-fiber-count samples obtained at work stations representative of all. those in full operation at the time at Johns-Manville's Manville. New Jersey, plant during tour years for which such counts are available. 1965 1M7 1*71 1172 Laaa than 2 fibers 1S.6 9.8 14.0 91.0 2-5 5-12 fiber* fibers 24.8 ` 5U 13.7 25.5 27.2 43.9 9.0 Mon than 12 ftbets 8.3 51.0 14.9 (Fletim provided by Sheldon SomuoH, .director or ItMttb ond invUonmonul trialra Idr the AFl-CIOS todutlritl unton dtoarantm) tion before deriding whether it would meet the reduced exposure standards or close down much of the plant. (Apropos of Johns-Manville's priorities, it might be noted that, while the company ex pressed qualms about spending more money to make its factories safer places to work in. it recently spent 525.9 mil lion to transfer its corporate headquar ters from New York City to a pristitxsetting twelve miles outside Denver.) Dr. SelikofF took a different view of Hodgsons four-more-years decision. Estimating that some 100,000 men and women will enter asbestos-related in dustries before the fiber count is low ered in 1976. he predicted that 20,000 of them might be expected to die of lung cancer, 7,000 of mesothelioma, and an other 7,000 of other cancers and asbestosis--a high rate of death from these disease that could, and should, have been lowered.. 1972 proved to be a paradoxical year in Johns-Manville histoty. In Washing ton, as we have seen, one company spokesman after the other had pre dicted dire financial results not just for the industry but for the entire econ omy if the fiber count were lowered. Back in Manville, however, company engineers were bringing the count way down without causing a dip in the divi dends. At the hearings Sheldon Samuels, director of health and environmental af fairs for the afl-oo's industrial union department, had told spokesmen for the industry this could be done; the spokes men had insisted it couldn't. Fiber-count statistics provided by Samuels [see box] are revealing in a number of ways. Not only do they make dramatically clear how vastly the situation at Manville improved in 1972; the)- also indicate that controls were slack well into the supposedly safe Sixties. With 91 per cent of the plant now operating within the standard Set for 1976, things are looking up at Manville. Even such critical observers as Dr. Borow and Dr. SelikofF say that they are impressed by the changes made. Still, these tardy improvements are small comfort io people like Smitty, who "can't do anything." Nor shall they benefit those Manville citizens who in the next few years will suffer from hav ing worked at or lived near the plant when conditions were far more hazard ous than they are today. CHEV BB 011144 i 31