Non-fibrous mineral dusts and malignant tumors: an epidemiological study of mortality.

The connection between enhanced oncological risk and the exposure to non-fibrous mineral dusts receives a contradictory but mostly negative estimation in the literature. The present authors estimated the death rate by relating the number of deaths from cancer, registered at different companies during a 21 to 27-year span, to the number of man-years of work for all employees during the same period. The death rates, calculated as above, were compared with the age standardized analogous death rates of the control population.