Document YGN6kyVe9GGvM7EprY0N5YRmk

5. n. CRITICAL REVIEW OF LITERATURE A careful review of the published material on this sub ject shows that the majority of the reports are clinical and not epi demiological. They lack many elements necessary for the applica tion of epidemiological techniques to their content and most of the authors do not make claim to having done so. What has happened ie that succeeding authors have drawn conclusions and generalized beyond the scope of the works which they quote. Nowhere, for ex ample, have we found references to a population of asbestos workers, although several authors who have quoted the observed incidence of lung cancer in autopsies of persons who also had asbestosis imply that this incidence applies to asbestos workers. We have likewise been unable to find any study which actually calculated the incidence of lung cancer among a population of persons who had asbestosis, and not just those who came to autopsy. With the exception of a paper by ,, (63) Doll , none of those reviewed gave any data on exposure and dust concentrations, and even Doll's paper merely mentions "scheduled" areas, by which i9 meant, "those areas where processes are carried on which-werc scheduled under the Asbestos Industry Regulations of 1931 as being dusty." There is, furthermore, a complete lack of definition of terms as used in the published literature. For example, the term