"Ain't Necessarily So!": The Brake Industry's Impact on Asbestos Regulation in the 1970s.
David Rosner, Gerald Markowitz
Author Information
David Rosner: David Rosner is with the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, and the Department of History, Columbia University, New York, NY. Gerald Markowitz is with the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, John Jay College, and the Department of History, Graduate Center, both of the City University of New York, New York, NY.
Gerald Markowitz: David Rosner is with the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, and the Department of History, Columbia University, New York, NY. Gerald Markowitz is with the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, John Jay College, and the Department of History, Graduate Center, both of the City University of New York, New York, NY.
Canada is proposing a ban on asbestos, and the US Environmental Protection Agency has listed it among the first 10 materials it is investigating under the new Toxic Substances Control Act revisions. However, this effort is currently running up against enormous industry and political opposition. Here, we detail the activities in the early 1970s of the Friction Materials Standards Institute, an industry trade association, to stifle earlier attempts to regulate asbestos use in brake linings, one of the oldest and most obvious sources of asbestos exposure to mechanics, among others. (Am J Public Health. 2017: 1395-1399. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2017.303901).
References
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