The comments received from the peer reviewers of the draft NIOSH document “Asbestos and Other Mineral Fibers: A Roadmap for Scientific Research” are compiled below. The peer reviewers were asked to respond to 14 questions. Their general comments on the document are presented first, and their responses to each question follow in no particular order of author. To move to the comments on a specifi...

This commentary responds to the recent critique by Weinstock and Slatin [1] of our systematic review on the effectiveness of occupational safety and health (OSH) training conducted jointly by the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) in Canada and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in the United States [2, 3]. We address misunderstandings of our perspectives on traini...

The issue here is how to estimate age-specific values of lung cancer ERR at a given dose for the US population, in the presence of large differences in baseline rates caused by smoking status. The NCI approach, documented in the 2003 NCI-CDC report on revision of the NIH Radioepidemiological Tables (Land et al. 2003), differs from the NIOSH-IREP approach in the balance that is chosen between th...

Approximately two years after promulgation of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Office of Compensation and Analysis Support selected a contractor team to perform many aspects of the radiation dose reconstruction process. The project scope and schedule necessitated the development of an organization invol...

In 2013, an occupational medicine physician from the University of California, San Francisco, contacted CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) about two oil and gas extraction worker deaths in the western United States. The suspected cause of these deaths was exposure to hydrocarbon gases and vapors (HGVs...

BACKGROUND The term "crystalline silica" refers to crystallized form of SiO2 and quartz, as the most abundant compound on the earth's crust; it is capable of causing silicosis and lung cancer upon inhaling large doses in the course of occupational exposure. The aim of this study was to assess occupational exposure to dust and crystalline silica in foundries in Pakdasht, Iran. MATERIALS AND ME...