Asbestos Money May Have Tainted Research
Officials at McGill University have recently announced that they will be reviewing piles of research concerning asbestos and asbestos diseases after an alleged connection between the lead researcher and the asbestos industry was called into question. If money from the asbestos industry did indeed influence the results of the asbestos research, many of the conclusions and recommendations based on that research may have to be thrown out – a devastating setback to the anti-asbestos groups and mesothelioma patients alike.
David Eidelman, the university’s dean of medicine, made the announcement shortly after a CBC exposé alleged that J. Corbett McDonald’s decades of research may have been deliberately altered in return for money from Canada’s now struggling asbestos industry.
However, Eidelman is quick to warn that McDonald must remain innocent until proven guilty and that just because the outcome of his research does not match that of others in similar studies it doesn’t mean that he’s in the pocket of big business.
McDonald, recently retired, began studying mortality rates associated with asbestos diseases way back in 1966. He examined the individual cases of 11,000 miners and millers of chrysotile asbestos in Quebec. Based on that research, a number of studies were published between 1971 and 1998. The studies, while influential, have been called into question recently because many researchers have come to very different conclusions in similar studies since McDonald published his findings.
While nobody at the time made the connection between his abnormal results and the project’s funding, part of which came from the Institute of Occupational and Environmental Health of the Quebec Mining Association, that relationship has led some to believe that McDonald may have doctored his results to appease the asbestos mining industry.
However, in McDonald’s defense, Eidelman says that though his research contradicts much of that which has been published since, McDonald did definitively prove that exposure to asbestos is a causal factor for developing lung cancer, mesothelioma, and other forms of cancer. And McDonald himself made no secrets about where the funding for his research was coming from.
Eidelman reiterated that says McGill researchers must perform their work to the highest ethical standards and that is why McDonald’s research has been called into question – not because there is currently any proof of wrong doing. Rather than begin with the assumption that results had been influenced, McGill University official will paw through the data, the findings, and the funding to discover whether or not there was any impropriety.
Eidelman declined to comment on what would happen to McDonald’s research or the man himself if the investigation discovered that he allowed his published results to be influenced by funding sources.
