<P> In 1899, Dr. Montague Murray noted the negative health effects of asbestos . The first documented death related to asbestos was in 1906 . </P> <P> In the early 1900s researchers began to notice a large number of early deaths and lung problems in asbestos - mining towns . The first such study was conducted by Dr. H. Montague Murray at the Charing Cross Hospital, London, in 1900, in which a postmortem investigation of a young man who had died from pulmonary fibrosis after having worked for 14 years in an asbestos textile factory, discovered asbestos traces in the victim's lungs . Adelaide Anderson, the Inspector of Factories in Britain, included asbestos in a list of harmful industrial substances in 1902 . Similar investigations were conducted in France and Italy, in 1906 and 1908, respectively . </P> <P> The first diagnosis of asbestosis was made in the UK in 1924 . Nellie Kershaw was employed at Turner Brothers Asbestos in Manchester, England from 1917, spinning raw asbestos fibre into yarn . Her death in 1924 led to a formal inquest . Pathologist Dr William Edmund Cooke testified that his examination of the lungs indicated old scarring indicative of a previous, healed, tuberculosis infection, and extensive fibrosis, in which were visible "particles of mineral matter...of various shapes, but the large majority have sharp angles ." Having compared these particles with samples of asbestos dust provided by Dr S.A. Henry, His Majesty's Medical Inspector of Factories, Cooke concluded that they "originated from asbestos and were, beyond a reasonable doubt, the primary cause of the fibrosis of the lungs and therefore of death". </P> <P> As a result of Cooke's paper, parliament commissioned an inquiry into the effects of asbestos dust by Dr E.R.A. Merewether, Medical Inspector of Factories, and C.W. Price, a factory inspector and pioneer of dust monitoring and control . Their subsequent report, Occurrence of Pulmonary Fibrosis & Other Pulmonary Affections in Asbestos Workers, was presented to parliament on 24 March 1930 . It concluded that the development of asbestosis was irrefutably linked to the prolonged inhalation of asbestos dust, and included the first health study of asbestos workers, which found that 66% of those employed for 20 years or more suffered from asbestosis . The report led to the publication of the first Asbestos Industry Regulations in 1931, which came into effect on 1 March 1932 . These regulated ventilation and made asbestosis an excusable work - related disease . The term mesothelioma was first used in medical literature in 1931; its association with asbestos was first noted sometime in the 1940s . Similar legislation followed in the U.S. about ten years later . </P>

When was asbestosis first recorded by medical authorities