A study of lung cancer mortality in asbestos workers: Doll, 1955

Between 1935 and 1953, a series of publications appeared in England Germany and America reporting cases of lung cancer amongst asbestos workers. As ea rly as 1943, the German scientific consensus was that the evidence was stro ng enough to deem the association to be causal. On reviewing a more extensi ve bibliography: this view was shared by an American cancer expert. The res ults of industry sponsored experiments, in which lung tumors had been induc ed in mice by asbestos, were circulated in confidence to its scientists, bu t being unpublished were unknown to the general scientific community. There were also cancer mortality data recorded for populations of exposed asbest os workers, but these were confidential and remained to be analyzed. To deal with the persistent allegations of a lung cancer hazard, in 1953 Dr . Richard Doll was asked by Turner Brothers Asbestos ("the Company"), whose in-house analyses had been reassuring, to study the mortality data of a gr oup of its workers. Despite the limitations of the data, Doll convincingly demonstrated so substantial an excess of lung-cancer in heavily exposed lon g-term asbestos workers as to overcome honest doubt. Despite determined attempts made to dissuade them, Doll and the editor of t he journal to which he submitted his paper; courageously went ahead and pub lished the paper Industry overestimated the harm that publication of the pa per would do to their immediate interests. If produced so profound a lack o f sense of urgency, that legislation addressed to the control of lung cance r specifically had to wait 20 years, and asbestos workers contracting it we re to wait 25 years, before they might be considered for compensation, mid even then, only under extremely limiting conditions. Am. J. Ind. Med. 36:33 1-347, 1999. (C) 1999 Wiley-Liss, Inc.