DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305 © (415) 497-5052

STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS

January 27, 1977

Dr. John F. Finklea

Director ————e_

National Institute for Occupational
Safety and Health

Parklawn Building

Rockville, Maryland 20852

Dear Dr. Finklea,

Thank you very much for sending me the material on asbestos that I had
requested. The document "RE-EXAMINATION AND UPDATE OF INFORMATION ON THE
HEALTH EFFECTS OF OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURE TO ASBESTOS", December, 1976, was
particularly valuable to me in the preparation of my lectures for my course
on health. It also appropriately complicated my understanding of our present
knowledge of dose/adverse health consequences of exposure to asbestos. I am
fully sympathetic with the difficulties of establishing useful criteria and
standards in the face of a hazard which has already such a tragic history of
abuse and in the absence of more reliable quantitative information. In such
circumstances it may be inevitable that political judgments must be made to
accomplish any useful purpose at all and that these will unavoidably be
bereft of a complete rational justification. And this may be the best of
possible outcomes if there has been a careful consideration of all of the
side-effects of this kind of decision-making process.

What I have in mind is what appears to me a fundamental inconsistency
between the method finally used to support the standard of 0. 1 fiber and
the statement, page VI-2,"This recommended standard poses some difficulties
in that specific work practices and innovative engineering control or
process changes are needed. However, because of the well documented human
carcinogenicity from all forms of asbestos, these difficulties should not be
- cited as cause for permitting continued exposure to asbestos at concentrations
above 100,000 fibers per m?," I understand the thrust of that sentence to mean
that issues of convenience or economic cost should play no role in the establishment
of their standard.

However, when I try to discover the basis on which the 100,000 number was
reached, I find that what I can only describe as analytical convenience was the
fundamental argument. Nowhere could I find even an approximate answer to the
question: ton the one hand, what adverse health effects would be averted by the
reduction of the standard to .1 fiber; and (2) what residual health effects
from exposure to asbestos can be predicted from the approval of a standard
higher than the concentration of asbestos in the ambientair.

My own reading of the literature does not permit me to take either a
highly aroused or a highly conservative position with respect to the possible
health consequences of low asbestos exposure. I am concerned that in the face
of uncertainty that standard setting should be accomplished in a way that allows
the maximum freedom of action to incorporate the results of further knowledge

and which minimizes adverse social and economic side-effects, always while

over

POTN) +
Dr. John F. Finklea -2- 1/27/77

respecting the health requirements of workers. On these criteria I would
suggest that there may be more constructive options than publishing a 0.1
fiber standard: although I do not have the legal expertise to understand all
the other constraints under which the standard setting may operate.

In particular, I would suggest that the standard be a zero increase over
the ambient air, which strikes me as the only logical position that can be
taken if you disregard economic costs and in the face of the assertions that
“any level" of asbestos is harmful. Of course, I understand all the complications
of a "zero tolerance approach" but these in my view should not be incorporated
into the standard but rather into the regulations concerning its matter of
implementation. You could, for example, mandate that factories employing asbestos
monitor the air concentrations periodically with their own air sampling and
monitoring equipment and that this have a sensitivity of at least .1 fiber.
You could also require that large samples be periodically collected and submitted
to some central laboratory from time to time for more refined examination, or
to do this in the face of explicit suspicions that there may be exposure in
excess of the ambient air.

 

This may seem like a more draconian step than the 0.1 fiber standard, but
in fact I believe it leaves more room for further inquiry about what constitutes
a "health-significant" increase of exposure. It would be quite possible to refine
my definitions to make them statistically meaningful by specifying the sampling
rate and the percentile of the ambient air density distribution that had to be
achieved as the mean value in the factory - for example, that the mean value
not exceed the 95th percentile of community exposure.

Some of the unanticipated side-effects of publishing a specific 0.1 fiber
standard will be the inevitable public misunderstanding of such a standard as
signifying that this is known to be a dangerous level for human health. We have
seen innumerable examples where well meaning efforts to provide a very large
margin of protection in one context have resulted in exactly that misunderstanding.
If you publish a 0.1 fiber standard, what possible rationale is there to apply
this only to manufacturing locations that explicitly use asbestos? Will it not
be necessary also to protect the employees (not to mention the patrons) of
theaters that may have asbestos curtains? Can you foresee the possibility of the
errosion of the value of private homes that have incorporated asbestos in their
construction? These are not empty speculations: this morning's paper carried
news of a California State inquiry on exposure of school children to asbestos
that may have been used in the construction of public buildings. The 0.1 fiber

" standard appears to be a critical judgment about what constitutes a hazard.

I think the no increase over ambient is much less likely to be misunderstood as
reflecting such a judgment at a time when it has no firm basis in scientific
analysis.

 

 

*

I had some difficulty in understanding the thrust of the report with respect
to the synergism of asbestos with cigarette smoking but the existing data still
appear to me overwhelming. In that context, do you know if any special effort
has been made to inform workers who are exposed to asbestos of the multiplied
hazard that they bring upon themselves by the use of tobacco? Is such a pattern
of education within the scope of OSHA in circumstances like the present one? - 7

over
Dr. John F. Finklea -3- 1/27/77

Finally, I have wondered whether there might be genetic factors in
individual susceptibility to asbestos. I have been quite unable to find any
literature that would bear on this question. If you know of any pertinent
studies, I would be most interested to get the references. One, but not the
only, point that I had in mind was the possibility of an interaction with
alpha-l-antitrypsin defect with the fibrotic reaction to asbestos which would
be a possibly plausible analog to the known role of that genetic defect in
emphysema.

Sincerely yours,

Gow Jantere

Professor of Genetics

    

JL/rr