A group of researchers at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., is challenging a U.S. report which downplays the human death toll from low-level exposure to asbestos.
In the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, Profs. Theodor Sterling and James Weinkam and graduate student Wilfred Rosenbaum, all of the university’s school of computer science, criticize a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Health Effects Institute.
“This . . . report concludes that the lung-cancer hazard of low-dose exposure to environmental asbestos is too low to be verified by ordinary, epidemiological methods,” Sterling says. “But animal and human studies have clearly shown the deadly nature of even modest exposures to environmental asbestos fibres.”
The university researchers say the report’s authors ignored ample evidence of cancers and other asbestos diseases associated with low levels of asbestos exposure, among the families of asbestos miners and among people living near asbestos-manufacturing plants.
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