You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
PostScript
Letter
New standard for assessing asbestos exposure and its consequences?
  1. L Christine Oliver1,
  2. Laura Welch2,
  3. Arthur L Frank3,
  4. Richard A Lemen4,
  5. Luciano Mutti5
  1. 1 Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Occupational Health Initiatives, Inc, Brookline, Massachusetts, USA
  2. 2 Center for Construction Research and Training, Washington DC, USA
  3. 3 Drexel University School of Public Health, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
  4. 4 Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  5. 5 University of Salford, Salford, Greater Manchester, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr L Christine Oliver, Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Occupational Health Initiatives, Inc, 1101 Beacon Street, Ste 8 East, Brookline, MA 02446, USA; coliver{at}ohiinc.com

https://doi.org/10.1136/oemed-2016-103693

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Comment

    Bofetta and La Vecchia1, in their commentary, state that ‘The paper by Gilham et al, published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, is important for a number of methodological and substantive reasons…’.2 In fact, there are methodological and substantive flaws in the paper that call into question the study results and authors' conclusions.2

    1. The authors rely on occupational history as a key point of reference in asbestos exposure assessment. Lifetime occupational history was obtained through telephone interviews of patients with malignant mesothelioma and from general population and lung cancer controls. The implication is that these interviews were conducted directly with study subjects. However, the authors state that informed consent for …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Comment on the original article: Gilham C, Rake C, Burdett G, et al. Pleural mesothelioma and lung cancer risks in relation to occupational history and asbestos lung burden. Occup Environ Med 2015.

    • Competing interests LCO, LW, ALF and RAL have acted as expert witnesses in asbestos litigation at the request of injured workers, their spouses and others.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    Linked Articles