Volume 200 - Issue 6
Asbestos exposure during home renovation in New South Wales
Authors: Anthony R Johnson and Deborah H Yates
Med J Aust 2014; 200 (6): 315. || doi: 10.5694/mja13.00263
Published online: 7 April 2014
Published online: 7 April 2014
Arguments drawing attention to this serious problem must be backed up by the most current and accurate evidence
In reply: We thank Lemen and colleagues for their letter. However, this seems to go beyond both the intention and the scope of the article. We did not state that the risk of disease from chrysotile “is still controversial”; we stated that “no threshold for exposure has been identified for chrysotile in recent World Health Organization reports, although this issue is still controversial”, then citing Bernstein and colleagues.1 This reference was not cited in our original manuscript, but was specifically requested by one of the reviewers. Although we seldom agree totally with every paper (or indeed with every reviewer), we would defend the right of authors to quote peer-reviewed papers in order to present the spectrum of opinion, and also that of reviewers to suggest this. Both the chrysotile debate and other researchers’ funding are outside the focus of our paper, which was to highlight a serious and widespread exposure to asbestos in Australia.
As the word controversial is defined as “forming an object of debate, disputed” (Shorter Oxford English dictionary2), we believe that this word was appropriately used.
Competing interests
No relevant disclosures.