Deregulating Safety: The Case of the Effort to Ban Asbestos
本文回顾了石棉作为工业毒素的历史证据，从19世纪末英国工厂检查员发现其危害，到20世纪中期确认其导致石棉肺、肺癌和间皮瘤，揭示了石棉使用引发的致命疾病流行。
A sbestos dust is, perhaps, the best-documented industrial toxin in history and has been shown to cause asbestosis, a deadly pneumoconiosis, as well as lung cancer and mesothelioma. In the late 1890s, "Lady Factory Inspectors" from the British Office of Factory Inspection identified it as an "evil dust" that caused an "insidious disease" and strangled workers years after exposure. In 1935 the first case reports of asbestos workers coming down with lung cancer were reported in the European and American literature, and in 1955 Sir Richard Doll, the eminent epidemiologist who first demonstrated the association of cigarette smoking and lung cancer, identified asbestos workers as being at high risk for lung cancer. By the early 1960s, researchers in South Africa, Britain, and the United States documented how mesothelioma, an extremely rare cancer of the lining of the lung, occurred among those exposed to asbestos. By then few serious public health, medical, or industrial toxin experts questioned that asbestos workers, and even those exposed at home, were at risk of asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma. Indeed, the widespread use of asbestos created an epidemic of previously unidentified fatal diseases.