In conjunction with drafting comprehensive legislation concerning compensation for health effects related to asbestos exposure (the Fairness in Asbestos Injury Act), the Senate Committee on the Judiciary directed the Institute of Medicine to assemble the Committee on Asbestos: Selected Health Effects. This committee was charged with addressing whether asbestos exposure is causally related to adverse health consequences in addition to asbestosis, mesothelioma, and lung cancer. Asbestos: Selected Cancers presents the committee's comprehensive distillation of the peer-reviewed scientific and medical literature regarding association between asbestos and colorectal, laryngeal, esophageal, pharyngeal, and stomach cancers.

For decades asbestos was considered an ideal substance and therefore was called 'the mineral of the twentieth century'. Even though the fiber had already proven much earlier to cause various ailments, a real boom began in the 1950s and prospered everywhere in Europe. This book retraces the history of the Swiss asbestos cement company Eternit, investigating the strategy it developed – together with other asbestos industrialists – to prevent this carcinogen from being outlawed until, in 1999, an EU Directive was finally adopted to this end. The book also reviews the struggle of the asbestos workers and their families to gain official recognition of, and compensation for, the harm suffered.

When the Manville Corporation filed under Chapter 11 of the federal Bankruptcy Code in 1982, it was the most financially healthy company ever to do so. Its action temporarily halted product-liability lawsuits brought against the company by the victims of asbestos-related cancer and other diseases. "Outrageous Misconduct" updates Paul Brodeur's remarkable four-part series of articles on the asbestos industry that appeared in "The New Yorker". It examines Manville's unprecedented -- and headline-making -- maneuver; it exposes the efforts of other asbestos manufacturers to avoid compensating asbestos victims; and it reveals the involvement of some of the nation's highest officials in trying to bail out the asbestos industry from its financial and legal difficulties. In "Outrageous Misconduct" Brodeur reveals in depth and detail the story of how Manville and other companies effected a fifty-year coverup of the asbestos hazard. He also tells the story of how a handful of dedicated trial lawyers have pieced together the overwhelming evidence of this coverup and used it in courtrooms across the nation to win hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from the asbestos industry and its insurers. -- From publisher's description.

Beyond the Factory Gates examines the issue of asbestos and health in the USA between the early 1900's to the mid-1970s. Areas covered include the emergence of medical concern about the three fatal diseases related to asbestos (asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma); the actions of the US Navy (the main consumer of asbestos-based insulation products); the response of the federal government before and after enactment of the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970; and the roles of organized labour and the asbestos industry. The book provides an important insight into occupational health and its regulation in twentieth century America, and is original in several ways. First, there is no satisfactory history of asbestos, health and medicine in the USA - a major gap in the literature. Second, no previous publication has examined the asbestos issue 'beyond the factory gates' in a non-manufacturing context and explored the complex interactions between organised labour, the US Government, business corporations and the US navy. Finally, Beyond the Factory Gates avoids the one-sided, anti-business interpretations that predominate much of the existing literature. It accepts that the history of asbestos is in many ways a human tragedy, but it rejects simplistic, universalised arguments that this has been a tragedy with a cast only villains, dupes and victims.

For decades, manufacturers from around the world relied on asbestos to produce a multitude of fire-retardant products. As use of the mineral became more widespread, medical professionals discovered it had harmful effects on human health. Mining and manufacturing companies downplayed the risks to workers and the general public, but eventually, as the devastating nature of asbestos-related deaths became common knowledge, the industry suffered terminal decline. A Town Called Asbestos looks at how the people of Asbestos, Quebec, worked and lived alongside the largest chrysotile asbestos mine in the world. Dependent on this deadly industry for their community’s survival, they developed a unique, place-based understanding of their local environment; the risks they faced living next to the giant opencast mine; and their place within the global resource trade. This book unearths the local-global tensions that defined Asbestos’s proud history and reveals the challenges similar resource communities have faced – and continue to face today.

Written by one of the leading asbestos experts for attorneys, occupational and environmental health professionals, and others in the field of toxic substances control, this updated resource provides a comprehensive examination of the public health history of asbestos. Includes extensive discussion of corporate knowledge and responsibility for asbestos hazards and detailed discussion of alternatives to asbestos.