Assessment of mineral fibres from human lung tissue.

Abstract

Since the discovery that the inhalation of asbestos fibres could cause pulmonary disease attempts have been made to relate the level of lung damage found at necropsy to the lung fibre burden. At first, studies of asbestos fibres and bodies from lung tissue were qualitative' 2; later the first attempts at quantification used estimations of fibre mass.3 For many years studies of lung fibre burden have been based on the counting of fibres by increasingly sophisticated techniques but the published results have not been-directly comparable in many cases, and from the few interlaboratory comparisons that have been undertaken it has become obvious that large variations in counts may be produced from the same lung. At present counts of asbestos fibres from lung tissue are becoming very important in medicolegal cases all over the world, often without appreciation of their limitations. For this reason an international workshop was held in Oxford, from 17 to 19 September 1984, to discuss all technical problems related to the estimation of the content of mineral fibres in lung tissue and to determine what could be done to make results from different laboratories more directly comparable. This paper summarises the main points of discussion and the conclusions reached. A list of workshop participants is given at the end.