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Written by one of the leading asbestos experts for both plaintiff and defense attorneys, occupational and environmental health professionals, as well as others in the field of toxic substances control, Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects has become the definitive resource on the medical and legal aspects of asbestos.

Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects provides a comprehensive examination of the public health history of asbestos, from the origins of industrial use to the present. It includes in-depth coverage of prior and ongoing litigation; extensive evaluation of the legal arguments put forth by plaintiff and defense counsel; and provides crucial information, materials and resources on the evolving corporate knowledge of asbestos hazards. The book covers in detail: asbestosis and cancer; compensability of asbestosis and cancer as occupational diseases; thresholds and standards used to determine safe or acceptable levels of asbestos exposure in the workplace; and company knowledge of asbestos hazards, gleaned from countless depositions, company records, industry consultants and trade associations.

Some items new to the Fifth Edition include:

extensive discussion of corporate knowledge and responsibility for asbestos hazards
extensive examination of the international struggle over asbestos, whereby some countries have banned asbestos while others have continued to expand their usage of asbestos in building materials
detailed discussion of alternatives to asbestos.

STILL LEGAL, STILL LETHAL
Most Americans mistakenly believe asbestos was banned long ago. In fact, it is still legal and can still kill you. Its microscopic fibers cause painful and incurable diseases.

Despite being outlawed in nearly every other industrialized country, asbestos remains a legal component of more than three thousand common products in the United States. These include toasters, washers/dryers, ovens, building supplies, and automobile brakes. Our confusion about asbestos is no accident.

Fatal Deception is a chilling exposé of the asbestos industry’s successful seventy-year campaign to hide the deadly effects of its products from the American people. The stakes are high — tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Michael Bowker rips the cover off the decades of deceit, including the treachery in Libby, Montana, site of the most deadly environmental disaster in U.S. history. He also unveils a startling and ongoing cover-up at Ground Zero — where thousands of New Yorkers may still be suffering from exposure to dangerous levels of asbestos fibers.

Compelling, enraging, and very timely, Fatal Deception is not just a fascinating story, it is a plea to the government and to the American people to help sponsor research into asbestos-related diseases — and a call to arms to ban asbestos now.

“Extensive bibliographies, appendices listing the natural and synthetic fibrous minerals and materials, together with a mineralogical and medical glossary, complete a professional overview of a serious problem.” –Australian Mineral Foundation Informative Book Review
“This monograph may not only be useful for occupational professionals, it’s worth reading also for all those, concerned with environmental health.” –Arbeitsmedizin

This comprehensive sourcebook describes the chemical, physical, and mineralogical aspects of fibrous inorganic materials, both synthetic and naturally occurring. A general description of the fibrous state, the range of compounds that can adopt this form, and an overview of the characteristics unique to such materials form the backbone of the book . The authors also assess the application and use of asbestos and other fibrous materials in industry and evaluate their potential as health hazards. The information gathered here will be highly useful to medical investigators and legal professionals involved in environmental health.

In the early twentieth century, asbestos had a reputation as a lifesaver. In 1960, however, it became known that even relatively brief exposure to asbestos can cause mesothelioma, a virulent and lethal cancer.
Yet the bulk of the world’s asbestos was mined after 1960. Asbestos usage in many countries continued unabated.

This is the first global history of how the asbestos industry and its allies in government, insurance, and medicine defended the product throughout the twentieth century. It explains how mining and manufacture could continue despite overwhelming medical evidence as to the risks. The argument advanced in this book is that asbestos has proved so enduring because the industry was able to mount a successful defense strategy for the mineral–a strategy that still operates in some parts of the world. This defence involved the shaping of the public debate by censoring, and sometimes corrupting, scientific research, nurturing scientific uncertainty, and using allies in government, insurance, and medicine.
The book also discusses the problems of asbestos in the environment, compensating victims, and the continued use of asbestos in the developing world. Its global focus shows how asbestos can be seen as a model for many occupational diseases–indeed for a whole range of hazards produced by industrial societies. The book is based on a wealth of documentary material gained from legal discovery, supplemented by evidence from the authors’ visits and researches in the US, the UK, Canada, Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, Australia, Swaziland, and South Africa.

This volume presents a rigorous account of statistical forecasting efforts that led to the successful resolution of the Johns-Manville asbestos litigation. This case, taking 12 years to reach settlement, is expected to generate nearly 500,000 claims at a total nominal value of over $34 billion. The forecasting task, to project the number, timing, and nature of claims for asbestos-related injuries from a set of exposed persons of unknown size, is a general problem: the models in this volume can be adapted to forecast industry-wide asbestos liability. More generally, because the models are not overly dependent on the U.S. legal system and the role of asbestos as a dangerous/defective product, this volume will be of interest in other product liability cases, as well as similar forecasting situations for a range of insurable or compensable events.

The volume stresses the iterative nature of model building and the uncertainty generated by lack of complete knowledge of the injury process. This uncertainty is balanced against the Court’s need for a definitive settlement, and the volume addresses how these opposing principles can be reconciled. The volume is written for a broad audience of actuaries, biostatisticians, demographers, economists, epidemiologists, environmental health scientists, financial analysts, industrial-risk analysts, occumpational health analysts, product liability analysts, and statisticians. The modest prerequisites include basic concepts of statistics, calculus, and matrix algebra. Care is taken that readers without specialized knowledge in these areas can understand the rationale for specific applications of advanced methods. As a consequence, this volume will be an indispensable reference for all whose work involves these topics.

The authors analyze the costs and compensation paid for asbestos personal-injury claims, and discuss such issues as the current state of asbestos litigation in the United States, the costs of compensation, the effects of litigation on businesses, and the evolving character of litigation.

“This is a comprehensive textbook on asbestos. a ] The ‘pathological’ chapters are excellent and are logically set out. a ] The accompanying photographs in each chapter are a ] crisp, and demonstrate their purpose with finesse. Overall, these features make the book an absolute must for a pathologist whose working practice involves significant asbestos case exposure.” (Dr. S. Kolar, acp News a” Winter, 2004)
Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, North Carolina. Reference to pathologic abnormalities associated with exposure to asbestos fibers, for pathologists. 14 Contributors. DNLM: Asbestos pathology.

Focusing on how toxic scare stories are literally spooking the general public out of house and home, Haunted Housing is a compelling expose of the fears and realities of radon, lead, asbestos, and electromagnetic fields. Haunted Housing is a manual for buyers and sellers of homes, regulators, legislators, and public policy analysts. Haunted Housing is sensible, scholarly, skeptical, pragmatic, and wonderfully well written for the non-specialist general reader. When the media constantly bombards the public with scare stories about the effects of substances on our families and homes (and a network of federal bureaus and regulations further fuel the hysteria), Haunted Housing stands alone as a clarion appeal to common sense and the application of scientific reasoning. — Midwest Book Review

Moore argues that we need to apply risk/benefit analysis to the exaggerated claims being made today.

A brilliant book by a brilliant reporter—one of the most important books I’ve read in years. — Terry Tempest Williams, author of Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

A testament to the strength of ordinary citizens acting in the “common good.” — Jim Hightower

A tip of the hat to Andrea Peacock who … brought this lethal … story into the light of day. — Charles Bowden, author of Blood Orchid

Skillfully exposes a true axis of evil and its dire human effects … a “must read” for people of conscience. — Jim Harrison

This is a story almost too terrible to read, yet too terrible to put down. — Rick Bass, author of The Book of Yaak

Beyond the Factory Gates examines the issue of asbestos and health in the USA between the early 1900’s to the mid-1970s. Areas covered include the emergence of medical concern about the three fatal diseases related to asbestos (asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma); the actions of the US Navy (the main consumer of asbestos-based insulation products); the response of the federal government before and after enactment of the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970; and the roles of organized labour and the asbestos industry.

The book provides an important insight into occupational health and its regulation in twentieth century America, and is original in several ways. First, there is no satisfactory history of asbestos, health and medicine in the USA – a major gap in the literature. Second, no previous publication has examined the asbestos issue ‘beyond the factory gates’ in a non-manufacturing context and explored the complex interactions between organised labour, the US Government, business corporations and the US navy. Finally, Beyond the Factory Gates avoids the one-sided, anti-business interpretations that predominate much of the existing literature. It accepts that the history of asbestos is in many ways a human tragedy, but it rejects simplistic, universalised arguments that this has been a tragedy with a cast only villains, dupes and victims.