National Specialty Society for Community Medicine Position Statement on Chrysotile Asbestos June 2010 Background The adverse health effects associated with exposure to asbestos exposure have been well established. Epidemiological, clinical, and laboratory studies have shown that asbestos is capable of causing lung cancer, mesothelioma, and a range of asbestos‐related diseases (International ...

Crushed serpentinite quarried in Montgomery County, Maryland, has been extensively used for paving roads and other surfaces. The mineral assemblage includes antigorite or lizardite as well as chrysotile and tremolite. Air samples taken in the vicinity of serpentine-paved roads show that chrysotile concentrations are about 10(3) times greater than those typically found in urban ambient air in th...

OBJECTIVES Mounting evidence suggests that asbestos fibres can stimulate alveolar macrophages to generate the potent inflammatory and fibrogenic mediator, tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha), and that this may play an important part in the onset and development of airway inflammation and lung fibrosis due to asbestos fibre inhalation. Little is known, however, about the ability of other mi...

This issue of the European Respiratory Journal contains an article entitled “The asbestos fibre burden in human lungs: new insights into the chrysotile debate” by FEDER et al. [1]. Although respiratory physicians are very familiar with the devastating health effects of past asbestos exposure, many nonspecialist readers probably wonder what this “chrysotile debate” might be and how this article ...

The problems of quantitating chrysotile in water by fiber count techniques are reviewed briefly and the use of mass quantitation is suggested as a preferable measure. Chrysotile fiber has been found in almost every sample of natural water examined, but generally transmission electron miscroscopy (TEM) is required because of the small diameters involved. The extreme extrapolation required in mat...

We report a prevalence study of environmental pleural plaques in subjects over 50 years old from the northeastern Corsican village of Murato, built on asbestos surface deposits. The percentage of plaques was 41%, versus 7.5% in the control village of Vezzani. Although surface deposits contain both chrysotile and tremolite, airborne pollution and asbestos lung burden of exposed inhabitants consi...