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South Carolina

One of the largest studies of asbestos exposures involved a plant in Charleston, SC, using primarily chrysotile asbestos received from Quebec and (then-called) Rhodesia. This facility began producing asbestos packing materials for steam engines and pumps in 1896, then switched to textile manufacturing in 1909. Reportedly less than 2000 Ib of crocidolite was used annually for about 20 years to make tape or braided yarn. Amosite exposures are believed to have occurred at the plant mostly before 1950 based on lung fiber results of workers; amosite was also acquired in the late 1950s for experimental purposes (McDonald, 1998; Berman and Crump, 2003, p. 6-4, footnote 2). Studied by two separate investigative teams using slightly different inclusion criteria (McDonald et al., 1983a; Dement et al., 1994), the latter cohort had a total of 3022 subjects with estimated cumulative exposures to asbestos of 26-28 f/ml-yr based on particle counts. No mesothelioma cases were found for the 1229 women of this cohort group who were at risk of exposure for 52,000 person-years. Among the white male workers of the plant, two mesothelioma cases based on death certificates were observed in the study cohort of Dement et al. (1994). They were employed at the plant for 25 and 32 years, primarily in the spinning operations. An additional case (not included in the cohort) that occurred after the study closure was observed in a white male employed mostly in nontextile operations. McDonald et al. (1983b) found only one of these cases using different criteria for subjects being studied resulting from different follow-up times. The notion that the Carolina cohort was exposed almost exclusively to chrysotile asbestos fibers is very questionable (Berman and Crump, 2003). The lungs of deceased workers of this Carolina plant cohort contained substantial amounts of amosite, crocidolite, anthophyllite, tremolite, mullite, and other fibers (case, 1994; Green et al., 1997). Green et al. (1997) reported mineralogical findings for lung samples taken from necropsies of employees during 1940 to 1965 at the Charleston plant who were in the Dement cohort and matched cases from the same hospitals. They compared the results of 38 textile production workers to 31 controls who did not have personnel file records at the Charleston plant. They found that the geometric mean of the number of crocidolite and amosite fibers was increased compared to controls (p < 0.05) and that 28% of asbestos workers and 13% of the controls had values of crocidolite or amosite exceeding 1 × 10^sup 6^ fibers per gram of dry lung, a cutoff level indicating a "substantially increased" number of fibers at the authors' laboratory. The results suggest that at least some workers at the Carolina textile plant were significantly exposed to amphiboles. Both mesothelioma cases reported by Dement et al. (1994) worked in the spinning area of the plant and possibly were exposed to amphiboles (Sebastien et al., 1989). Although no corresponding published information was found for the South Carolina facility, inhalable crocidolite fibers from bushings in spinning machines were linked to a case of mesothelioma in a worker at a nonasbestos textile factory in Korea. The standard (B-style) bushings were used to protect against gear abrasion in the spinning machines (Yu et al., 2002).