Asbestos and disease: an industrial hygienist's perspective

I have traced a personal thirty year journey of involvement with asbestos in the workplace and the nonoccupational environment, one still in progress, in an attempt to extract selected lessons for the industrial hygienist. Lessons for other professions, namely medicine, law and management have been studiously avoided in the interests of the scope of this presentation and permissible time. There are certainly numerous other lessons to contemplate. The movement of asbestos from the occupational to the nonoccupational environment is a case study that will undoubtedly be followed in the future by other potentially toxic materials. We must determine our position as a profession with regard to the tools we utilize, the procedures we follow, and our understanding of our moral and legal obligations to prepare for the often scientifically and technically unsupportable positions assumed by others, including governmental agencies, in their zeal to bring about change. We must discourage the opportunistic distortion of professional practices in these matters, and must issue well considered statements as a profession, statements relevant to the way these matters are addressed by society. We have a responsibility to lend perspective to these issues, to not permit understandably emotional responses to documented past severe health effects in other areas, such as the case of asbestos in the workplace, to carry over into conditions of very low exposures in the public domain. We must remind people of the relevance of dose-response and toxicological principles to assessment of risk.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)