Asbestos Podcast EP29 Transcript
Episode 29: The Shipyard Generation
Full transcript from Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — a 52-episode documentary podcast produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP.
| Episode Information | |
|---|---|
| Series | Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making |
| Season | 1 |
| Episode | 29 |
| Title | The Shipyard Generation |
| Arc | Arc 6 — The War Effort (Finale) |
| Produced by | Charles Fletcher |
| Research and writing | Charles Fletcher with Claude AI |
| Listen | Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube |
Episode Summary
September 1972. A 52-year-old man sits in Dr. Irving Selikoff's office in New York with a cough that won't go away. The X-ray shows something on his lung. Mesothelioma. He worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1943. The exposure was 29 years ago. The disease arrived on schedule.
Episode 29 is the Arc 6 finale — five episodes of statistics, corporate memos, and wartime production numbers arrive at the human cost. Veterans are 30% of all mesothelioma diagnoses despite being only 6-7% of the population, a four-fold overrepresentation driven by round-the-clock asbestos exposure aboard every ship in the fleet. The average latency: 49.4 years. The range: 14 to 72. Only 4% of cases appear within 20 years. The episode profiles three survivors from Beating the Odds — Michelle, Lannie, and Icom — and documents the 1977 discovery of the Sumner Simpson Papers that finally proved the cover-up. It ends with the tragic timing of Selikoff's October 1964 study: science proved the danger just ten weeks after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution began the Vietnam escalation that would expose 3.4 million more servicemembers.
Key Takeaways
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Full Transcript
The Man in the Doctor's Office
Host 1: September 1972. New York City. A man is sitting in a doctor's office.
Host 2: What's he there for?
Host 1: A cough that won't go away. He's 52 years old. The X-ray shows something on his lung.
Host 2: What does the doctor say?
Host 1: Mesothelioma.
Host 2: And the doctor asks —
Host 1: When did you last work with asbestos?
Host 2: The man says?
Host 1: Brooklyn Navy Yard. 1943 to 1945. Insulation work in the engine compartments.
Host 2: How long ago was that?
Host 1: Twenty-nine years. The doctor nods. He's seen this before.
Host 2: That's how latency works.
Host 1: That's exactly how it works. The man in that office is not unusual. He's one of 4.5 million workers who went through the wartime shipyards. He's one of thousands who sat in that same chair with that same question. And every one of them asked the same thing next.
Host 2: Why did it take so long?
Host 1: Today on Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — Episode 29: The Shipyard Generation. The finale of Arc 6: The War Effort. Veterans. Survivors. The documents that proved the cover-up. And a scientist who proved the danger — ten weeks too late.
The 30 Percent
Host 2: Let's start with the number that frames this whole episode. You've mentioned it across Arc 6 but I want to hear it again.
Host 1: Veterans are six to seven percent of the U.S. population.
Host 2: And in mesothelioma?
Host 1: Thirty percent of all diagnoses.
Host 2: One group. Six to seven percent of the country. Thirty percent of the disease.
Host 1: That's a four-fold overrepresentation. And when you look specifically at Navy veterans —
Host 2: How much worse?
Host 1: Six point four seven times more likely to die from mesothelioma than the general population.[2]
Host 2: Not two times. Not three. Six point four seven.
Host 1: The reason is engineering. The Navy used over 300 different asbestos-containing products on a single ship.[9]
Host 2: Three hundred products. On a single ship.
Host 1: And the exposure wasn't intermittent. A factory worker goes home at night. He breathes clean air for sixteen hours. A sailor lived inside his exposure. He slept ten feet from the boiler room. He ate in a mess hall surrounded by asbestos-insulated pipes. He worked in engine compartments where visibility could drop to zero in clouds of dust.
Host 2: Twenty-four hours a day.
Host 1: Seven days a week. Years of service. And about a thousand veterans are diagnosed every year. Still. Today.
Host 2: Because of the latency.
Host 1: That's where this episode goes. The number that explains how all of this worked.
The Latency Arithmetic
Host 2: Let's talk about the latency period. What does the data actually say?
Host 1: Average latency for shipyard workers: 49.4 years. Documented range: 14 to 72 years.[3]
Host 2: Fourteen to seventy-two.
Host 1: Only four percent of cases appear within twenty years. One third don't appear until after forty years.
Host 2: So the man at Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1943 —
Host 1: Doesn't get sick until the early 1990s. He's in his seventies. The executives who made the decisions about his work environment are either retired or dead. There is no obvious connection between a cough in 1992 and a pipe he insulated in 1943.
Host 2: That's not coincidence. That's the mechanism.
Host 1: It is. The latency period is what made the whole architecture of suppression viable. We've talked about the 1930 memo. The 1935 Simpson letter. The 1947 ATI vote against cancer research. Why do all of this?
Host 2: Because by the time the workers started dying —
Host 1: No one would make the connection. That was the calculation. And it almost worked.
Host 2: Almost.
The Survivors
Host 1: For the next few minutes, I want to go somewhere different. We've spent five episodes in the boardrooms and the memos and the statistics. I want to tell you about three people.
Host 2: From the book.
Host 1: Dave Foster — Executive Director of Patient Advocacy at Danziger and De Llano — edited a collection called Beating the Odds. Stories of unexpected mesothelioma survival. The people in this book were given death sentences. And they didn't die on schedule.
Host 2: Tell me about them.
Host 1: The first one is Michelle.
Host 2: How old was she when she was diagnosed?
Host 1: Ten.
Host 2: Ten years old.
Host 1: Her father worked with asbestos. Every day when he came home from work, she ran to hug him. His work clothes were covered in dust.
Host 2: She got it from hugging her father.
Host 1: Secondary exposure. She didn't work in a shipyard. She didn't know what asbestos was. She was four years old when the exposure began. She was ten when the diagnosis arrived. 1980.
Host 2: What did they tell her family?
Host 1: Three to six months.
Host 2: And she lived —
Host 1: Thirty-five years.
Host 2: Thirty-five years past a three-month prognosis.
Host 1: She raised a son. She adopted four children. She counseled over two hundred families who had just gotten the same diagnosis she had gotten at ten years old. She never charged a penny for any of it. She passed away in 2015. She was forty-four years old.
Host 2: Thirty-five years.
Host 1: Thirty-five years.
Host 2: Tell me about Lannie.
Host 1: Lannie was a conservation officer in Virginia. Not a shipyard worker. Not a Navy veteran. This is important.
Host 2: Why?
Host 1: Because people still think of mesothelioma as a shipyard disease. A Navy disease. And it is those things. But Lannie's exposure was brake linings. Vehicle gaskets. Equipment insulation. The asbestos got everywhere. Into occupations nobody thought of as asbestos jobs.
Host 2: When was he diagnosed?
Host 1: 2007. He was sixty-two. His doctor told him: eighteen months without surgery.
Host 2: How long has it actually been?
Host 1: As of when we recorded this: seventeen years past that prognosis.
Host 2: Seventeen years.
Host 1: His wife Linda is a nurse — thirty years in the profession. She kept every record. Every scan. Every test result. Every conversation with every doctor. And she wrote about all of it. They've spent nearly two decades doing what the statistics said couldn't be done.
Host 2: The third one.
Host 1: Icom.
Host 2: Who was he?
Host 1: A Navy boilerman. Ten years of service. USS Kearsarge. USS John A. Bole.
Host 2: The most dangerous job on a ship.
Host 1: The engine compartment. Ten years living inside the exposure. He was diagnosed in 2016. But what makes his story remarkable beyond survival is this: he became the first VA patient in the country to receive approval for pleurectomy with decortication surgery.
Host 2: The VA hadn't recognized it yet.
Host 1: He was the first through that door.
Host 2: And now?
Host 1: Eight years past his prognosis. Every morning, his greeting to everyone he meets is the same four words.
Host 2: What does he say?
Host 1: "It's a beautiful day."
Host 2: Three people who shouldn't have survived.
Host 1: Three people out of thousands who didn't. That's the number you carry with you when you hear about average prognosis and median survival. Statistics describe populations. These are people.
Arc 6: The Verdict
Host 2: Five episodes. Let's add them up.
Host 1: June 1940: 168,000 workers in U.S. shipyards. December 1943: 1.7 million.[10] The Stephenson memo: don't do health inspections, it will "disturb the labor element."[11]
Host 2: Howard Zinn.
Host 1: Started as an apprentice at Brooklyn Navy Yard before he became one of America's most famous historians. He was nineteen. Breathing asbestos dust in compartments where visibility could drop to zero.
Host 2: The women.
Host 1: Six point five percent of the shipyard workforce in 1942. Thirteen percent by war's end.[12] Lucille Kolkin — tack welder, Brooklyn Navy Yard. She and thousands of women like her carried the fibers home in their clothing. Their husbands' wives developed mesothelioma decades later from washing work clothes.
Host 2: Then the postwar expansion.
Host 1: 343,000 tons of asbestos in 1945. 709,000 tons in 1955. A 107% increase in peacetime.[13] The 1947 ATI vote: six to two against cancer research because it would "stir up a hornet's nest."[14] Forty million homes.
Host 2: The Braun-Truan fraud.
Host 1: The private report says asbestosis increases cancer risk. The published version? That finding deleted.[15]
Host 2: Richard Doll.
Host 1: Proof in 1955. Suppressed in the U.S. for another twenty years.
Host 2: They knew. They had known since at least 1930.
Host 1: And they calculated: how long until the workers start dying? Thirty years. Forty. By the time the cases appear, the executives will be retired. The workers will be grandfathers. No one will connect a cough in 1972 to a pipe insulated in 1943.
Host 2: Almost the perfect crime.
Host 1: Almost.
The Documents That Proved It
Host 2: What broke the architecture?
Host 1: Litigation. 1977. South Carolina.
Host 2: What happened?
Host 1: A lawsuit forces documents into the open. Internal Johns-Manville files going back to the 1930s. These become known as the Sumner Simpson Papers.[6]
Host 2: Who was Sumner Simpson?
Host 1: President of Raybestos-Manhattan. Friend of Vandiver Brown, Johns-Manville's corporate attorney. The two men were the center of gravity for how the asbestos industry handled — or didn't handle — the health evidence.
Host 2: What was in the documents?
Host 1: A 1930 memo titled "Pulmonary Asbestosis." A 1931 letter from Vandiver Brown explaining the deliberate four-year delay of a government study. And the 1935 Simpson letter. We've mentioned it before. Here's the sentence.
Host 2: Go ahead.
Host 1: "The less said about asbestos, the better off we are."
Host 2: Written in 1935. Found in 1977. Forty-two years of silence.
Host 1: No protective order stopped them from going public. Within months, a California congressman featured them in congressional hearings. The Washington Post reported that asbestos companies had "hid evidence" for more than thirty years.[16]
Host 2: What happened to Johns-Manville?
Host 1: August 1982. Bankruptcy. Sixteen thousand lawsuits.[7]
Host 2: The Dow Jones?
Host 1: Removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Host 2: And the trust?
Host 1: The Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust. Established 1988. Initial capitalization: $2.5 billion. Total paid out since then: more than $5 billion.[17]
Host 2: And it became the template.
Host 1: Sixty-plus asbestos bankruptcy trusts now exist. Estimated $30 billion in total assets. The Manville bankruptcy invented the mechanism by which victims could still be compensated after the company that hurt them ceased to exist.
Host 2: Because of one lawsuit in South Carolina. In 1977.
Host 1: One lawsuit. One set of documents. Forty-two years after the letter was written.
Selikoff and the Terrible Timing
Host 2: Tell me about Selikoff. You've mentioned him across this arc. But let's put him in full now.
Host 1: Irving Selikoff. Born in Brooklyn in 1915.
Host 2: Brooklyn.
Host 1: Jewish kid who couldn't get into American medical schools in the 1930s. The quotas were real. He studied in Scotland. He studied in Australia. He came home to Mount Sinai Hospital.
Host 2: What was he doing there?
Host 1: Initially tuberculosis. He co-discovered isoniazid — the antibiotic that became the foundation of TB treatment. He won the Lasker Award for that work.
Host 2: And then the Asbestos Workers Union comes to him.
Host 1: They asked him to see their members as patients. And he started seeing patterns. Workers dying young. Cancer at rates that made no sense.
Host 2: What did he find?
Host 1: He examined 632 asbestos insulation workers who had entered the trade before 1943. Among 255 deaths, 45 were from lung or pleural cancer.[5]
Host 2: How many were expected?
Host 1: 6.6.
Host 2: Six point six expected. Forty-five observed.
Host 1: A 6.8-fold excess. And there were four mesotheliomas.
Host 2: In a population of 255 deaths?
Host 1: In a population of 255 deaths. Mesothelioma was so rare that some pathologists doubted its existence as a distinct diagnosis. Four cases in one cohort was extraordinary.
Host 2: When did he present this?
Host 1: October 19, 1964. A conference at the New York Academy of Sciences. "The Biological Effects of Asbestos."
Host 2: October 1964.
Host 1: Now I need you to hold a date in your head.
Host 2: What date?
Host 1: August 7, 1964.
Host 2: What happened on August 7?
Host 1: Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Senate: 88 to 2. House: 414 to 0. The Vietnam escalation begins.
Host 2: Ten weeks before Selikoff presents his findings.
Host 1: Ten weeks. And I want to be precise about what that means. By October 1964, science had proved — definitively — that asbestos causes mesothelioma and lung cancer. At low exposures. At brief exposures. Even wives who only washed their husbands' work clothes.
Host 2: And the response —
Host 1: The industry attacked Selikoff. Called him an alarmist. An exaggerator. And while the attack was underway —
Host 2: The military was shipping out.
Host 1: Peak U.S. asbestos consumption: 803,000 tons in 1973 — the height of Vietnam-era military use.[18] Three point four million Vietnam-era servicemembers were deployed.[19] The Navy continued using asbestos until the mid-1970s.
Host 2: What's the latency for Vietnam veterans?
Host 1: Average: 49 years. Peak deployment: 1968. 1968 plus 49 years.
Host 2: That's 2017.
Host 1: We're in the window now. The reckoning for the Vietnam generation — the one Selikoff could see coming in October 1964, two months after the Gulf of Tonkin — is happening today.
Arc 7 Preview: The Reckoning Begins
Host 2: Where does Arc 7 start?
Host 1: It starts with what happened after Selikoff's warning. Because a warning is only as good as the response to it. And the response was — not what it should have been.
Host 2: What was the response?
Host 1: The industry attacked him. They funded counter-research. They lobbied against regulation. They had allies in government. But the documents were starting to leak. The whistleblowers were starting to emerge. And the document discovery — the Simpson Papers in 1977 — that wasn't a one-time event. It was the beginning of a paper trail that would eventually reach a jury.
Host 2: The trials.
Host 1: Arc 7: The Reckoning. Selikoff's warning. The document discovery. The Vietnam generation entering the mortality window. The legal architecture that finally put the evidence in front of twelve people who had to decide whether corporations knew.
Host 2: Did they?
Host 1: They knew since 1930. The Simpson Papers proved it. The jury verdicts confirmed it. Arc 7 is where the decades of suppression finally produce a reckoning. Next week.
Named Entity Reference
This section provides structured reference data on key individuals and organizations mentioned in this episode.
Irving Selikoff
Dr. Irving Selikoff (1915–1992) was an American physician and researcher at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Born in Brooklyn, he was unable to attend American medical schools due to quota restrictions and received his training in Scotland and Australia. He co-discovered isoniazid, the foundational antibiotic for tuberculosis treatment, for which he received the Albert Lasker Award. Beginning in the 1960s, he conducted landmark epidemiological studies on asbestos workers. His 1964 study of 632 insulation workers documented 45 cancer deaths where only 6.6 were expected — a 6.8-fold excess — providing the first definitive American proof of asbestos's carcinogenicity. He presented these findings at the New York Academy of Sciences on October 19, 1964, ten weeks after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorized the Vietnam War escalation. He founded the Environmental Sciences Laboratory at Mount Sinai and published extensively on occupational disease until his death in 1992.
Sumner Simpson
Sumner Simpson was president of Raybestos-Manhattan, one of the largest asbestos product manufacturers in the United States. His correspondence with Vandiver Brown, the corporate attorney for Johns-Manville, became central to understanding the asbestos industry's deliberate suppression of health evidence. His 1935 letter — "The less said about asbestos, the better off we are" — was among the documents forced into public view during South Carolina litigation in 1977. These documents, known collectively as the Sumner Simpson Papers, became the evidentiary foundation for subsequent asbestos litigation and confirmed that the industry had knowledge of the hazards decades before workers began dying.
Lucille Kolkin
Lucille Kolkin was a tack welder at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, one of tens of thousands of women who entered the American shipbuilding workforce between 1942 and 1945. Women represented 6.5 percent of the shipyard workforce in 1942 and reached 13.3 percent by 1945. Kolkin's experience was later documented and became part of the historical record of female shipyard workers' exposure to asbestos. Secondary exposure to asbestos — particularly through contact with asbestos-laden work clothing — has since been documented as a significant cause of mesothelioma among the families of shipyard workers.
Dave Foster
Dave Foster is the Executive Director of Patient Advocacy at Danziger & De Llano, LLP. He lost his own father to an asbestos-related disease. He edited Beating the Odds: Stories of Unexpected Mesothelioma Survival, a collection documenting individuals who significantly exceeded their prognoses following mesothelioma diagnosis. The survivors profiled in this episode — Michelle, Lannie, and Icom — appear in that collection. Foster has worked with mesothelioma families for nearly two decades, providing advocacy support for patients navigating diagnosis, treatment, and legal options.
Johns-Manville Corporation
Johns-Manville was the largest asbestos manufacturer in the United States for most of the twentieth century. Founded from the merger of H.W. Johns Manufacturing and the Manville Covering Company in 1901, the corporation became the center of asbestos product manufacturing, producing insulation, roofing, floor tiles, and construction materials. Internal documents — including correspondence from corporate attorney Vandiver Brown and board decisions made from the 1930s through the 1960s — established that Johns-Manville's leadership was aware of asbestos's health hazards and made deliberate decisions to conceal that information from workers and the public. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on August 26, 1982, under the weight of 16,500 personal injury lawsuits. It was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust, established in 1988, was capitalized at $2.5 billion and has since paid out more than $5 billion to mesothelioma victims and their families. It became the template for the more than 60 asbestos bankruptcy trusts that now collectively hold an estimated $30 billion in total assets.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Why do veterans make up 30% of all mesothelioma diagnoses?
Veterans are 6 to 7 percent of the U.S. population but account for 30 percent of all mesothelioma diagnoses — a four-fold overrepresentation driven by the continuous nature of military asbestos exposure, particularly in the Navy. Unlike a factory worker who goes home at night, sailors slept, ate, and worked within feet of asbestos-insulated pipes, boilers, and machinery around the clock, for years of service. The Navy used over 300 different asbestos-containing products on a single ship. Navy veterans are 6.47 times more likely to die from mesothelioma than the general population. Approximately 1,000 veterans are diagnosed each year.
What was the average latency period for shipyard workers with mesothelioma?
The average latency period for shipyard workers is 49.4 years, with a documented range from 14 to 72 years. Only 4 percent of cases appear within 20 years of exposure. One-third of cases don't appear until more than 40 years after exposure. A worker exposed at Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1943 at age 22 would typically not develop symptoms until the early 1990s — when he was in his seventies, when there was no obvious connection between a cough and a pipe he insulated half a century before. Vietnam-era veterans, exposed during peak military asbestos use from 1964 to 1975, are in their peak mortality window now.
Who were the three mesothelioma survivors profiled in this episode?
Three survivors appear in Beating the Odds, edited by Dave Foster of Danziger & De Llano. Michelle was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma at age 10 following secondary exposure from her father's asbestos-laden work clothing. Given 3 to 6 months to live in 1980, she survived 35 years, raised and adopted children, and counseled over 200 families before passing in 2015 at age 44. Lannie, a Virginia conservation officer exposed through brake linings and vehicle gaskets, was diagnosed at 62 in 2007 and given 18 months. More than 17 years later, he continues to exceed his prognosis. Icom, a Navy boilerman on USS Kearsarge and USS John A. Bole, was diagnosed in 2016 and became the first VA patient to receive surgical approval for pleurectomy with decortication. Eight years later, his daily greeting is: "It's a beautiful day."
What were the Sumner Simpson Papers and why did they matter?
The Sumner Simpson Papers are internal asbestos industry documents spanning the 1930s through the 1950s, forced into public view during South Carolina litigation in 1977. They included a 1930 memo titled "Pulmonary Asbestosis," a 1931 letter from Johns-Manville attorney Vandiver Brown documenting the deliberate four-year delay of a government study, and Sumner Simpson's 1935 letter stating "the less said about asbestos, the better off we are." These documents proved the industry had known about asbestos's lethal hazards for decades before workers began dying. A California congressman featured them in congressional hearings within months. The Washington Post reported that companies had "hid evidence" for more than thirty years. Within five years, Johns-Manville filed for bankruptcy under 16,000 lawsuits.
What did Irving Selikoff's 1964 study find?
Dr. Irving Selikoff examined 632 asbestos insulation workers who had entered the trade before 1943. Among 255 deaths, 45 were from lung or pleural cancer — where only 6.6 were expected. That is a 6.8-fold excess. There were also 4 mesotheliomas — an extraordinarily high rate for a tumor so rare that some pathologists had doubted its existence. Selikoff presented these findings on October 19, 1964, at the New York Academy of Sciences, just ten weeks after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorized the Vietnam escalation that would expose an additional 3.4 million servicemembers to asbestos during peak U.S. asbestos consumption.
What is the current status of VA benefits for mesothelioma veterans?
Veterans with mesothelioma may be eligible for VA disability compensation, VA health care including treatment at VA cancer centers, and Dependency and Indemnity Compensation for surviving spouses and dependents. Mesothelioma is considered a service-connected condition for veterans with documented asbestos exposure during military service. Unlike certain PACT Act presumptive conditions, mesothelioma requires establishing a nexus between diagnosis and documented service-related asbestos exposure — typically through service records and a physician's nexus letter. Veterans may also pursue claims through asbestos bankruptcy trusts independent of VA benefits. Danziger & De Llano has represented veterans in both benefit and litigation contexts and can be reached at dandell.com.
References
- ↑ Testimony before Congress on veterans and asbestos disease; Department of Veterans Affairs occupational exposure documentation. Veterans represent approximately 30% of annual mesothelioma diagnoses in the United States, approximately 900–1,000 diagnoses annually.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Asbestos disease latency data drawn from multiple cohort studies; average of 49.4 years for shipyard workers with range of 14–72 years documented across occupational epidemiology literature.
- ↑ Foster, D. (Ed.), Beating the Odds: Stories of Unexpected Mesothelioma Survival. Survivor profiles of Michelle, Lannie, and Icom as documented in this collection.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Selikoff, I.J., Churg, J., Hammond, E.C. (1964). Asbestos exposure and neoplasia. JAMA, 188(1), 22–26. Presented at the Conference on the Biological Effects of Asbestos, New York Academy of Sciences, October 19, 1964.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Sumner Simpson Papers; internal Johns-Manville and Raybestos-Manhattan documents surfaced in South Carolina asbestos litigation, 1977. Includes correspondence from 1930–1955.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Johns-Manville Corporation Chapter 11 filing, August 26, 1982. Case No. 82 B 11656 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y.). Removed from Dow Jones Industrial Average following filing.
- ↑ Based on 49.4-year average latency calculation applied to peak Vietnam-era military asbestos exposure period (1964–1975). Peak mortality window: 2013–2024.
- ↑ U.S. Maritime Commission workforce data, 1940–1944. Shipyard employment grew from approximately 168,000 in June 1940 to 1.7 million by December 1943.
- ↑ Internal U.S. Navy correspondence regarding shipyard health inspection policy during wartime construction period.
- ↑ U.S. Maritime Commission and Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Women increased from 6.5% of shipyard workforce in 1942 to 13.3% by 1945.
- ↑ U.S. Geological Survey historical asbestos consumption data. U.S. consumption: 343,000 short tons (1945); 709,000 short tons (1955).
- ↑ Asbestos Textile Institute meeting minutes, March 1947. Vote: 6–2 against commissioning epidemiological cancer research. Quoted reason: "Such an investigation would stir up a hornet's nest and put the whole industry under suspicion."
- ↑ Braun, D., Truan, T.D. (1958). An epidemiological study of lung cancer in asbestos miners. AMA Archives of Industrial Health, 17, 634–653. Private report to Quebec Asbestos Mining Association contained finding that asbestosis increases cancer risk; that finding was deleted from the published version.
- ↑ Washington Post reporting on congressional hearings featuring Sumner Simpson Papers, 1977.
- ↑ Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust established pursuant to the Johns-Manville Plan of Reorganization. Initial capitalization $2.5 billion (1988); cumulative payouts exceeding $5 billion.
- ↑ U.S. Geological Survey. Peak U.S. asbestos consumption: approximately 803,000 metric tons in 1973.
- ↑ Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs records. Approximately 3.4 million U.S. servicemembers served in the Vietnam theater, 1964–1975, during peak military asbestos use.
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