To the Editor: I recently received written advice from the Australian Safety and Compensation Council (a division of the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations) that the records of the Australian Mesothelioma Surveillance Program (AMSP) have been lost.

As some of your readers would be aware, the AMSP, which ran between 1980 and 1985, was one of the most comprehensive medical surveys of mesothelioma undertaken anywhere in the world.1 The records of the program contain full occupational and environmental histories of about 1000 mesothelioma cases reported in the early 1980s. The program has played a significant role in helping to understand the epidemiology of mesothelioma in Australia. The level of detail of data in the AMSP has not been repeated by the Australian Mesothelioma Register, which succeeded the AMSP in 1985. This less detailed reporting scheme is the current basis for mesothelioma reporting to cancer registries in the country.

I am a geologist with an interest in medical geology currently studying to obtain a doctorate on naturally occurring asbestos and mesothelioma risk in Australia. I had hoped to use the detailed environmental and occupational data of the AMSP to help determine the possible influence of naturally occurring asbestos on mesothelioma in Australia, in particular in the eastern states and South Australia, but without the records this is no longer possible. Data from the Australian Mesothelioma Register are not sufficiently detailed for this purpose.

My intention in writing this letter is not to embarrass staff from the Australian Safety and Compensation Council, who have done their best to find the records and have been supportive of the project, but to create awareness of the loss, in the hope that the publicity may jog someone’s memory and result in the records being located. The potential permanent loss of these records would be a great loss to mesothelioma research in Australia and raises questions about the federal government’s policies surrounding long-term storage and archiving of nationally significant scientific research datasets that may be of benefit to future researchers.

Comment: The Australian Mesothelioma Surveillance Program (AMSP) operated between 1980 and 1985 and was maintained by the Commonwealth School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Sydney. These files were transferred to the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission (NOHSC) on its establishment in 1985. The NOHSC was relocated from Sydney to Canberra in 2001, and AMSP records went into storage at that time.

In February 2005, the NOHSC was succeeded by the Australian Safety and Compensation Council. We attempted to locate the records over several months in 2007. This involved manually searching through all files and boxes held by our contracted storage company marked as relating to either the AMSP or the Australian Mesothelioma Register. In addition, we had a staff member of the storage facility manually search the warehouse for these records in case they were in unmarked boxes or filing cabinets.

In November 2007, having been unable to locate the records, we informed Mr Hendrickx that we would be unable to assist him with access to the AMSP records for his doctoral studies.

It is certainly not our policy to discard records such as these and we were disappointed when they could not be easily located. We regret the potential loss of these important records to the research community and are still attempting to locate them.