Asbestos: How a Known Killer Stayed Legal for a Century

In 1898, a factory doctor in Charing Cross Hospital documented unusual lung scarring in textile workers who handled asbestos fibre. He called the condition "fibrosis of the lungs." By 1906, a French physician examining the lungs of asbestos workers at autopsy was finding the same thing. By 1930, the British factory inspectorate had completed a landmark study linking asbestos textile work to what it now called "asbestosis" — lung scarring — and recommending dust control measures.

The asbestos industry knew. Not suspected. Knew.

Documents later produced in litigation showed that by the 1930s, the largest asbestos manufacturers in the United States and Britain had commissioned their own medical research documenting the disease, had corresponded internally about the need to conceal the findings, and had made deliberate decisions to continue exposing workers while suppressing the evidence that would have required them to stop.

The story of asbestos is the story of how an industry that knew its product was killing its workers chose to defend that product for another fifty years — through funded research, regulatory lobbying, legal harassment of scientists, and compensation systems designed to exhaust claimants before their cases were heard.

The documentation of what the asbestos industry knew — and when — emerged primarily through discovery in personal injury litigation that began in the 1970s.

The key documents came from Johns-Manville, the largest asbestos manufacturer in the US. They included: • A 1933 letter from a company attorney instructing a physician conducting a workers' health study not to alert workers to their lung disease: "our interests are best served by having [the worker] not know." • Internal memoranda from the 1930s–1950s documenting awareness of asbestosis and mesothelioma • Evidence that the company monitored medical literature on asbestos disease and systematically suppressed employee access to that information

The Saranac Lake suppression The Saranac Laboratory in upstate New York conducted asbestos research for the industry in the 1930s and 1940s. Documents revealed that industry sponsors had the ability to review and suppress unfavourable results before publication — a systematic corrupting of the scientific record that delayed public knowledge of asbestos hazards by decades.

The role of Paul Brodeur Journalist Paul Brodeur's 1985 book "Outrageous Misconduct: The Asbestos Industry on Trial" was the first major public account of the industry's decades-long concealment. Drawing on the discovery documents from litigation, Brodeur documented in detail the gap between what the industry knew and what it said publicly — a gap that measured in decades and in deaths.

The legal legacy of asbestos is the largest mass tort in American history — and it continues today, decades after the peak of occupational exposure.

The bankruptcy wave By 2002, over 60 companies had filed for bankruptcy under the weight of asbestos personal injury claims — including Johns-Manville, W.R. Grace, Armstrong World Industries, and dozens of others. These bankruptcies created asbestos personal injury trusts, funded by the bankrupt companies, that now hold approximately $36 billion in assets for current and future claimants.

The trust system has been both praised as an efficient compensation mechanism and criticised for providing inadequate compensation and for fraud — with some claimants submitting claims to multiple trusts for the same exposure.

The mesothelioma latency problem Because mesothelioma takes 20–50 years to develop after exposure, claims continue to be filed for exposures from the 1950s–1980s. The peak of occupational asbestos exposure in the US occurred during World War II shipbuilding and the post-war construction boom. The peak of mesothelioma incidence has only recently begun to decline as those cohorts age and die.

The litigation science Asbestos litigation has produced some of the most extensive science on occupational carcinogen causation ever compiled. The industrial hygiene evidence establishing asbestos fibre concentrations in specific occupations, combined with the mesothelioma epidemiology, created dose-response relationships that are now among the most precisely quantified in carcinogenicity research.

Despite its well-known hazards and the devastation of the asbestos litigation, the United States has never fully banned asbestos — a distinction that sets it apart from most other developed nations.

More than 60 countries, including all European Union member states, have fully banned asbestos. The US has not.

The regulatory history The EPA attempted to ban asbestos in 1989 under the Toxic Substances Control Act. The rule was challenged in court by the asbestos industry, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned most of it in 1991 on the grounds that the EPA had not demonstrated that the benefits of a complete ban outweighed the costs — a legal standard that the circuit court applied in a way that made future comprehensive chemical bans under TSCA nearly impossible.

The 2016 Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act reformed TSCA and has allowed the EPA to restart asbestos risk evaluation. In 2024, the EPA issued a rule banning chrysotile asbestos — the last commercially used form in the US, primarily in chlor-alkali plants. This is a meaningful step — but it came 35 years after the 1989 rule was overturned, and it addresses only the remaining commercial uses rather than the legacy installed base in existing buildings.

The ongoing exposure An estimated 1.3 million construction and building maintenance workers are still exposed to asbestos in existing buildings annually. Renovation, demolition, and emergency work continues to disturb asbestos-containing materials in buildings constructed before the 1980s. The exposure story is not over — it has simply shifted from manufacturing to the maintenance of the legacy infrastructure that the 20th century left behind.