12/16/2023 0 Comments World war 1 gas mask for saleAs duration of employment was obtained from information in the wages book, we regarded the 1061 former workers with 45 mesotheliomas for whom duration of employment was recorded as an unbiased cohort, whereas the other 93 former workers with 20 mesotheliomas constituted a group made up of serendipitous additions biased by a diagnosis of mesothelioma. These additions were likely to contain a disproportionate number of mesotheliomas, as was clearly the case since there were 19 mesotheliomas in the 64 for whom neither year first employed nor duration of employment were recorded all but 10 of these were with known name, and therefore in Group A. 2 It is probable therefore that the cohort was increased by some of these missing former workers coming to light from pathological reports to Jones. Jones did not obtain a complete listing as some records had already been shredded when he rescued the wages book and, as he said, “an unknown number of names are therefore missing”. Originally 1088 of the 1154 employees were identified from the factory wages book, although there were nine duplicate pairs, leaving 1079. Year of birth was recorded for all but four subjects with year first employed in all but 29, and duration of employment in all but a further 64. Of these, approximately 93% were female, but both full name and sex were recorded in only 640 (Group A), and incomplete information in the other 514 (Group B). The records supplied by Dr Jones were of 1154 employees in the Nottingham factory, believed to have worked between 19 on gas mask assembly. Findings from a comprehensive follow up of the entire cohort are presented below. At that time, no systematic tracing had been made, but Jones, whose interest was widely known, had been informed by pathologists throughout the country of many further deaths from mesothelioma. 3 Shortly before he died in December 2000, Professor Stephen Jones, who first recognised the connection, discussed with one of us (JCMcD) the possibility of investigating the mortality of all known employees in the Nottingham factory, and passed over his records so that this could be done. These events, and the early mesothelioma epidemics which followed on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously, were described by Jones et al 1, 2 and McDonald and McDonald. A medical student who took a detailed history discovered that he had been a scientific officer, one of a small group responsible for setting up and managing an assembly plant in Ottawa of gas masks for the Canadian army, following the British specification exactly. In 1974, a man with stated occupation of musician was admitted to the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, also with pleural mesothelioma. All had been employed on the assembly of military gas masks, using filter pads prepared from 80% merino wool and 20% crocidolite (blue asbestos). Both had a malignant pleural mesothelioma by 1979, five more deaths from this tumour had come to light. In 1965, a 59 year old woman entered the City Hospital, Nottingham a few months later, another woman who had worked in the same factory also attended the hospital.
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