Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the National Research Council (NRC) to form a committee to provide a review of the scientific and technical quality of the January 2009 draft NIOSH Roadmap document. This report provides the committee’s assessment of the Roadmap and recommendations for strengthening its utility for NIOSH, other federal agencies, the private sector, and other stakeholders.

One of the major challenges faced in conducting research in this field is the terminology. Because the term asbestos does not denote a single mineral but rather is used to encompass a set of minerals with specific industrial characteristics and commercial value, there have been challenges and controversies in determining both what specific set of minerals and what set of characteristics should be included in a definition of asbestos. The current regulatory definitions used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) define six recognized minerals¹ as varieties of asbestos.

NIOSH recognized the need for a term to encompass a broad class of mineral particles of specific size and dimension that are the primary focus of the proposed research in the Roadmap and introduced the term elongated mineral particles² to attempt to capture this broad range of mineral particles. The committee considers the dimensions described in the NIOSH Roadmap definition (“longer than 5 μm with a minimum aspect ratio of 3:1”) as a good starting point for research. The term elongate mineral particles is a convenient, neutral, and unified means of describing various minerals across different professional disciplines but