International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health | An Interview with One of the Authors—Prof. Dr. Arthur Frank

Name: Prof. Dr. Arthur Frank
Affiliations: Department of EOH, Drexel University School of Public Health, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

“Epidemiological Trends in Mesothelioma Mortality in Colombia (1997–2022): A Retrospective National Study”
by Luisa F. Moyano-Ariza, Guillermo Villamizar, Giana Henríquez-Mendoza, Arthur Frank and Gabriel Camero
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2025, 22(5), 787; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph22050787
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/22/5/787

The following is a brief interview with Prof. Dr. Arthur Frank:

1. Congratulations on your recent publication! Could you briefly introduce yourself and your current research focus?
Yes, my name is Arthur Frank. I am a clinical professor and chair emeritus at the Drexel University School of Public Health. But I am also a professor of medicine and a professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering.
My main focus of research for more than 50 years now has been the health effects of asbestos. I started as a medical student at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, which was actively involved in asbestos-related research. I started there in the first class when the school opened in 1968 and have been engaged in asbestos research ever since, and that is what the publications are all about. I have been an academic physician my whole career.

2. What’s one major challenge in addressing environmental cancer risks that your work helps tackle?
Well, the major challenge from a public health standpoint is that only about 70 countries out of about 200 in the world have banned the use of asbestos. It is a material that nobody needs. There are certainly available substitutes and other materials that can be used. Even here in the United States, we have had no official ban except for certain products, and even now the industry is fighting; they have just gone to court to overturn and put on hold for the moment the most recent ban put in place, which was only for one fibre type. There are six fibre types of asbestos, and only for six conditions of use of that one fibre type was banned, and even that was too much for the industry to put up with.
So, they are fighting to put that ban recently put in place aside; they managed in 1989 to put a major ban aside. Countries in the EU and many mid-level and developing countries have used asbestos in the past, but have now banned it, and we know that the major user of asbestos is now the country of India, where, I believe, last year, they had about 1.4 million tonnes of asbestos. They have replaced China as the world’s No.1 user, and Russia continues to be the No.1 producer, with other major production in Kazakhstan and a few other countries. So, the biggest problem is stopping the use so that people will no longer get preventable diseases.
What we know is that even if we stopped it all over the world today, there would still be disease for at least 50 years forward because of the long latency of disease caused by asbestos. We no longer have any questions about whether it is a toxic material if it is a carcinogenic material. There are still some scientific questions of interest from a scientific point of view, not from a public health point of view; do the different fibres have equal or different abilities to cause disease? There are some cancers that some of us believe do occur, while others are still questioning. And a major issue around the world is the millions and millions of miles of asbestos cement pipes, which release asbestos fibres into drinking water, and many of us believe can cause gastrointestinal, kidney and other cancers potentially.

3. What common misconception about environmental links to health risk would you most like to clarify for the public?
I think the most common misconception is the untrue information. Some are telling people there is no such thing as climate change, that asbestos is not a hazard; it has been called by some people a hoax, which it is not. It was shown to be a disease-causing entity as far back as more than a hundred years ago, long before the country they accused ever got involved with the issue. Cancer has been known for about 80 years in terms of our ability to produce cancer. So, I feel that the biggest problem those of us have in the public health arena is to be honest. Scientifically supported information out there. We see that it is under attack in many ways, literally. Several days ago, the vaccine group for the CDC here in the United States met and decided to ban a material that no one has shown to be harmful, as it is used in vaccines. Fortunately, it only effects less than 5% of the vaccine supply for the flu vaccine here in the United States, but there is so much misinformation and so much unwillingness to admit in the world of environmental science and environmental health that there are real dangers to the planet and they will continually and most acutely affect the poorest people and the poorest nations around the world. In countries like Bangladesh, much of the arable land will be under water Islands, all over the world, we will see populations having to move because they will be underwater and to not recognise that the increasing heat in the planet comes from man-made activities which we need to reverse is the saddest thing that we see now in the field of environmental health.

4. Did you encounter any significant challenges while conducting your research? If so, how did you overcome them?
Well, there are always challenges in doing research. I find it interesting as a scientist (and I have worked at foreign academic institutions.) that there is a certain, and I do not mean this in a real negative sense, but a certain arrogance we have as scientists to ask people or companies or others to give us money because we have ideas and to support research, be it basic research, be it translational research. We ask for funding and for our support to come from not building things necessarily, not making widgets, even as a physician, not doing clinical care, which I have done most of my career, but we have, as researchers, ideas that we want to fund and we have to do proper science to answer certain questions, which then can lead to the betterment of mankind.
The other problem is that there has never been in my career sufficient stable funding that goes on and on. We see funding for research under attack right now, and personally, even about 40 years ago or longer, I was in the midst of a three-year project which, when a new administration came in, because a whole series of projects had been given funding under “special topics” as the headline, decided they did not need anything that was “special” and took away the grant funds in the middle of wherever anybody's grant was. So, I had an educational grant to educate physicians about occupational and environmental health, which, to this day, 40 years later, they still know very little about and get very little training in medical education.
It is the long-term stability and recognition of the importance of funding that, over the long term, saves lives and makes all of our societies better.

5. Could you share your experience of publishing in IJERPH?
It was one of the easier journals to be published in. I have been publishing ever since I was a college student. I published my first paper back in the 1960s, as someone who has above 200 or 250 publications. Now, some journals make it easy, some make it hard. This publication was pretty straightforward. What I found was that in the old days, you would send in a typescript, much easier than what is asked of us now, it would be typeset, and you would get a set of galleys; you could correct those.

We thank Dr. Frank for taking the time and sharing his expertise, and we look forward to seeing his continued efforts in contributing to a safer and healthier future. Wishing him all the best with his research and upcoming publications!