Comment on: Ogden T (2009) ‘Data sharing, Federal Rule of Evidence 702, and the Lions in the Undergrowth’

The editor in chief of the Annals of Occupational Hygiene (AOH) published a Commentary on data sharing in which he disagreed with certain points in a book by McCulloch and Tweedale on the global asbestos industry (Ogden, 2009). Referring to McGill University researchers who studied the mortality of Quebec asbestos miners, Ogden stated that, ‘It is therefore misleading to say, “By the end of the twentieth century, then, the McGill scientists had presented the world with a product that was whiter than white”’. We think the McGill group did downplay the hazards of the predominant form of asbestos and are moved to write because this is not just an academic matter. AOH published an intemperate editorial by a McGill scientist in 1997, depicting a powerful, anti-social, anti-asbestos lobby based at the Mt Sinai School of Medicine in New York (Liddell, 1997). This lobby was accused of carrying on a campaign of intense malice and personal abuse against the principal Quebec investigator, influencing moves by Sweden, Germany, and the USA to ban all forms of asbestos. Liddell went on to proclaim the ‘folly of removing asbestos from buildings’ and concluded that, ‘Chrysotile at current levels of occupational exposure is essentially innocuous’. By 1999, asbestos had been banned in leading European countries, and the McGill studies were exploited in promoting its use in the rest of the world. Chrysotile asbestos, the only variety of asbestos by then still involved in international trade and the type that had accounted for 95% of all asbestos use in the 20th century, was the type mined and extensively used in Brazil. Occupational exposure limits in many countries were 0.1 f/cc. Leading US epidemiologists projected that, even at that level of exposure to chrysotile for a working lifetime, 5 of 1000 workers would die from occupational cancer of the lung and 2 of 1000 of asbestosis (Stayner et al., 1997). In Brazil's largest newspaper, ‘Estado de Sao Paulo’, there appeared a report featuring the pronouncements by several scientists from abroad and the president of the asbestos mining company Eternit, titled, ‘Researchers Absolve Asbestos Used in Brazil’. (Galvão and Coelho, 1999; obtainable from Dr Castleman and the Annals of Occupational Hygiene editorial office). In the Brazilian news article, Corbett McDonald, longtime leader of the McGill group that had started doing research for the asbestos industry in 1966, was one of the scientists featured. The article stated, ‘In Brazil, despite the fact that the law permits up to 2.0 f/cc, the environment in the Eternit mine in Goiás has only 0.5 f/cc. The tolerance limit, according to McDonald, is 20 f/cc’. (In the original: ‘No Brasil, apesar da lei admitir até 2 fibras/cm3, o ambiente da mina da Eternit em Goiás tern apenas 0,2 fibras/cm3. O limite de tolerância, para Mc Donald, é de 20 fibras/cm3.’) It is not clear whether McDonald actually recommended that Brazil adopt a worker exposure limit for white asbestos 200 times as high as that in effect in the USA and some European countries at the time. His group had reported that, in Quebec, chrysotile miners and millers had little or no excess of lung cancer at lifetime exposures less than roughly 20 fibres/cc (Liddell et al., 1998). Soon after his return from Brazil, McDonald wrote a letter to the ‘American Journal of Industrial Medicine’. In a short paean to white asbestos, he asserted the ‘right’ of: ‘democratic but less fortunate countries [to] mine chrysotile for their own needs and that of their neighbours … This is especially true of such countries as Zimbabwe and Brazil, where there may be little or no tremolite contamination, yet pressing social and health needs for asbestos-cement products’ (McDonald, 2000). McDonald's letter opened by comparing banning asbestos to witch burning, alcohol prohibition, and McCarthyism, in opposing the Collegium Ramazzini's call for a global ban on asbestos use. He went on to assert that even chrysotile contaminated with tremolite asbestos ‘can be mined and used safely for the production of cement and friction products’. McDonald was expressing the position taken by Canada, which was seeking to overturn the ban on asbestos by France and block other countries from banning chrysotile asbestos. He accompanied Canada's lawyers to the scientific hearing on Canada's challenge to the French asbestos ban, held at the World Trade Organization in Geneva in January 2000. There, McDonald testified in support of Canada's position in an unusual procedural move made by Canada, but the WTO panel still dismissed Canada's challenge to the French ban (Castleman, 2002). From Britain to Brazil, people are familiar with the phrase ‘whiter than white’ from detergent advertisements. Whether you agree with them or not, it is clear that leading McGill asbestos researchers gave the sellers of white asbestos their ‘doctors recommend it’ endorsement at the turn of the millennium, as McCulloch and Tweedale concluded in their interesting book (McCulloch and Tweedale, 2008). Today, at least 46 countries have banned all forms of asbestos, while consumption increased in some other countries (World Bank Group, 2009). World asbestos production has leveled out at 2.05–2.4 million metric tons per year in 2001–2008, after declining from levels >4 million tons per year during the 1980s to under 2 million by the late 1990s (US Geological Survey data, 2009). Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigators went to India, Canada's largest export market, in 2009, to see how ‘safely’ Canadian asbestos is actually used in that country today. They filmed asbestos textile plant workers carrying piles of Canadian asbestos in their arms, wearing useless handkerchiefs over their noses for the dust swirling around them and settling all over their clothing. Representatives of the Canadian government, the Chrysotile Institute, and a proponent of the asbestos industry in Parliament declined to be interviewed in a leading national news documentary entitled, ‘Canada's Ugly Secret’ (Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 2009). Contrary to the policies advocated by the European Union, World Health Organization, and International Labour Organization, scientists from the McGill group have continued to be active in opposing national asbestos bans. Without their active support, it is unlikely that the government of Canada could have so long remained the leading promoter of asbestos use in the world. To the extent that their efforts have met with success in halting the decline in global asbestos use so far in the new millennium, these scientists share some responsibility for the fact that most of the world's people still live in countries where asbestos continues to be used, with minimal safeguards. Over 2 million tons of chrysotile asbestos each year goes into infrastructure that will pose a danger to workers and building occupants for the rest of the 21st century, whenever the structures need to be repaired, renovated, and demolished.

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