File 1 - Correspondence with and re the Asbestos Information Committee (AIC)

3 folders
Paper

From three lever arch files inscribed 'AIC correspondence', 'AI Committee | AIA | ARC' and 'Asbestos Information Centre | 1976/7 | 1984/7'

Correspondence with representatives of the Asbestos Information Committee (AIC) and its critics; among the former, AIC director W Penney and AIC deputy chairman Wilfred P Howard.

Topics covered include Nancy Tait's unanswered questions regarding the death of her husband, William Ashton Tait; the facts of asbestos; Tait's booklet 'Asbestos kills' (1976); and various AIC publications.

Further includes

• AIC leaflets and technical information notes, among them ‘Asbestos in the home’ (1983) and ‘Asbestos in building’ (1983)
• AIC's commentary on 'Asbestos killer dust' by Alan Dalton / the British Society for the Social Responsibility in Science, 1979
• AIC's commentary on Nancy Tait's booklet 'Asbestos kills'
• documentation re the asbestos industry's intense advertising campaign in June-July 1976
• Tait's detailed criticism of the Asbestos Research Council (ARC) educational leaflets 'Safe working with asbestos'
• a little correspondence with the ARC, 1969-1977

Also includes a little material re the Asbestos International Association (AIA), whose director general at the time, Alex Cross (A A Cross), requested access to the comments of the Study Group on Asbestos of the Economic and Social Committee of the EEC (Section for Protection of the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Affairs) on Tait's booklet 'Asbestos kills'.

The AIC was set up by the Asbestos Research Council (ARC) in 1967 to manage asbestos publicity (and lobbying). Sometime in the late 1970s the AIC changed its name to Asbestos Information Centre. Nancy Tait and other critics of the AIC found many of the AIC's statements inaccurate.

The set of aggregations originally contained a photocopy of the AIC's typescript ‘ACA final report - 24 October 1979: Industry Information Kit’. This duplicated material elsewhere in the collection; see link below, 'Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Asbestos'.

Some contents of folder 1 are restricted in compliance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 1998.

The records of the Study Group on Asbestos of the Economic and Social Committee of the EEC (Section for Protection of the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Affairs) can be consulted in the Petra-Kelly-Archive, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Berlin.

• English

Tweedale, G (2000) 'Science or public relations? The inside story of the Asbestosis Research Council 1957–1990', American Journal of Industrial Medicine 38: 723-734