Report at a Glance

A Review of the NIOSH Roadmap for Research on Asbestos Fibers and Other Elongate Mineral Particles

Prior and ongoing exposures to asbestos continue to contribute to respiratory diseases—including mesothelioma, lung cancer, and asbestosis—despite the fact that asbestos is no longer mined in the United States. Asbestos exposures are estimated to have contributed to 18,068 deaths from mesothelioma from 1999-2005; asbestos-related diseases continue to be diagnosed due to the long latency period for their manifestation.

To examine ongoing issues and concerns in this field, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) released a research roadmap in January 2009, Asbestos Fibers and Other Elongated Mineral Particles: State of the Science and Roadmap for Research, that provides an overview of the state of the science and a plan for future research in areas including toxicology, mineralogy, epidemiology, and exposure assessment.

The proposed research focuses on clarifying the relationship between human health effects and the physical and chemical characteristics of a wide range of elongate mineral particles. In 2008, NIOSH asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the National Research Council (NRC) to form a committee to review the scientific and technical quality of the NIOSH Roadmap. The committee found that NIOSH has put together a comprehensive and broad-based research Roadmap that could be improved through implementing a systematic and interdisciplinary approach to the outlined research.

TERMINOLOGY

One of the major challenges facing researchers in this field is the terminology. NIOSH recognized the need for a term to encompass a broad class of mineral particles of specific size and dimension that are the primary focus of the proposed research in the Roadmap. The term—elongate mineral particle—is a convenient, neutral, and unified means of describing those mineral particles across different professional disciplines but is neither a rigorous mineralogical classification nor is it of regulatory significance.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The NIOSH Roadmap brings together a substantial amount of information and a wealth of ideas on future directions for research, and therefore, it is necessary for the document to have a clearly stated vision and rationale. Additionally, the committee hopes that a more systematic and tiered approach to the research agenda will allow research to be conducted in a manner that will answer questions about which physical and chemical characteristics of elongate mineral particles are considered primary determinants of toxicity to humans, thus allowing identification of specific types of mineral particles that would be of concern to human health.