The Asbestos Industry vs. Dr. Irving Selikoff

Today most big tobacco companies acknowledge there is a link between tobacco use and cancer. But you might remember that for years they denied any such link. In 2006, a federal district court judge found that the tobacco industry had known for 50 years that smoking was bad for health. “They mounted a coordinated, well financed, sophisticated public relations campaign to attack and distort the scientific evidence demonstrating the relationship between smoking and disease,” Judge Gladys Kessler said.

You may not know that asbestos manufacturers pulled exactly the same scam with the dangers of asbestos — in particular, the link between asbestos and the deadly lung cancer mesothelioma.

There were suspicions about asbestos back in the days of the Roman Empire, and many 19th century physicians observed that asbestos seemed to cause lung problems. But the modern struggle for the truth about asbestos began in the 1960s, when a physician named Dr. Irving Selikoff published case studies of asbestos cancer victims.

Dr. Selikoff was practicing general medicine Patterson, New Jersey, when the Asbestos Workers Union asked him to treat its members. The doctor soon noticed that a remarkable number of asbestos workers suffered from mesothelioma, considered to be a rare disease.

In 1963, Selikoff published his research showing the link between asbestos and mesothelioma in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Other researchers had suggested this link before, but the scope and thoroughness of Selikoff’s study persuaded many people that asbestos had to be restricted. Dr. Selikoff continued to publish and speak out on the dangers of asbestos. His work caused the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to establish workplace safety protocols for asbestos for the first time.

The asbestos industry did not only deny the connection; it also launched a vicious attack against Dr. Selikoff. His research was publicly belittled, and industry lawyers sent him letters threatening lawsuits. However, Irving Selikoff did not back down.

Asbestos companies even hired investigators to put Dr. Selikoff under surveillance, hoping to find a way to smear him. In 1965, some industry spokespeople claimed Dr. Selikoff was an immigrant (in fact, he was born in New York City in 1935) and that he was licensed to practice in a foreign country, not the United States (he went to medical school in Scotland but was licensed in the U.S.). When Dr. Selikoff was named director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Division of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, the asbestos industry pressured Mount Sinai to fire him. Mount Sinai did not comply.

Dr. Selikoff died in 1992, yet the attacks did not stop with his death. Thirteen years after he died, a British historian and asbestos industry litigation consultant falsely claimed that Selikoff had never obtained a medical degree.

Most critically, the asbestos industry hired scientists to cast doubt on Dr. Selikoff’s work. This is the practice of “mercenary science” I’ve written about before. Several asbestos companies used a public relations firm to form the Asbestos Information Association, which existed to belittle research connecting asbestos to mesothelioma. Their hired scientists concluded that there was insufficient proof that chrysotile asbestos, the type most commonly used in manufacturing, was dangerous.

OSHA has so far refused to adopt this standard. Yet the fight continues, in spite of much more data showing a clear connection between asbestos of all forms and mesothelioma.

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