title: The British approach to asbestos standard setting: 1898-2000.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The asbestos industry started in the late 1870s, and the first accounts of severe respiratory disease in its workers were published in England (1898, 1906), France (1907), and Italy (1908). For a hundred years, a series of increasingly lower standards were set for asbestos in Britain: initially they purported to prevent asbestosis, and latterly to reduce asbestosis and malignancies to acceptable levels.
  
  
  METHODS
  Published accounts of how British asbestos exposure standards came to be derived are reviewed in the light of archival materials originated by industry and government.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The earliest standard, of necessity, was not evidence based and while subsequent standards purported to relate doses to effects, the indifferent quality of the measurement of dose, and the poor discrimination of effects, militated against arriving at a standard in which trust should be placed. Each successive standard that was accepted, conformed to what could be achieved in production processes, as far as it was reasonably practicable on technological and economic grounds.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  For the better part of a hundred years, confidence was misplaced in the ability of process engineers and physicians to protect workers against asbestos. Finally, deciding that asbestos was neither technologically nor economically essential, and was unsafe in use, Europe issued a Directive, to which Britain will conform, that will virtually ban it use throughout the Community by 2006.
authors.affiliation: Extramural, London, United Kingdom. gmgreenberg@macunlimited.net
authors.forename: Morris
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Greenberg
mesh_terms: D001194:Asbestos / Q000592:standards*; D001195:Asbestosis / Q000266:history / Q000517:prevention & control*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D016273:Occupational Exposure / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D006113:United Kingdom; D014481:United States
chemical_list: D001194:Asbestos