A report on the health of asbestos, Quebec miners 1940

Abstract

Background: Twenty years after the start-up of the Canadian asbestos industry, reports began to appear of respiratory disease and deaths in asbestos workers in England and in France. An inquiry from the UK in 1912 as to the health of Quebec miners was met by a denial of ill-health, but the loading of the premiums of asbestos workers in the 1930s indicated that, despite further reassuring health studies on Quebec miners, actuaries had data that gave cause for serious concern.

Methods: A report made to the Canadian asbestos industry by a company doctor in 1940, reviewing the literature and presenting his health findings on some 500 employees, was studied in the context of the published information available at the time, and of unpublished contemporaneous material subsequently obtained by legal discovery.

Results: The physician denied that the health and longevity of Quebec's miners and millers were adversely affected, and was dismissive of earlier reports of there being serious health risks associated with working with asbestos.

Conclusions: The methodology employed in his health study was defective and his denial of the literature uninformed. The study was widely circulated, and while it may have boosted Canadian industry morale, it met with a sceptical response from British industry. In denying that conditions in Quebec's asbestos mines and mills disabled and killed workers, the author allied himself to fellow professionals loyal to Government and to industry.