"Candido's List": the workers of Collotta Cis & Figli at Molina di Ledro in Trento Province, Italy. A tale of magnesia, asbestos and work.

The study entitled "Candido's List" (La Lista di Candido) is not the work of the three authors alone. A good part of the community is entitled to feel itself coauthor, each for his/her own part, of a research project that has succeeded in blending a variety of different ingredients: history, entrepreneurship, the industrialization of the Trento Province with all its high and low points, personal life stories, medicine, genius, work, women's emancipation, the past but also the present and future. The research comprises an eloquent collection of memories and a variety of iconographic materials; it has now become a book and a travelling exhibition containing the accounts of the people who worked at the Collotta-Cis factory in Molina di Ledro. It starts with the brilliance of Pier Antonio Cassoni, who in 1816 deposited the first patent in the world for the extraction of magnesium carbonate, and closes with the decontamination of the factory site in the late 1980s. A needful section has been set aside for the painful facts relating to the processing of asbestos fibre; a final space, midway between an artistic reading and an interpretation for the future, has seen the involvement of the Circolo Fotoamatori di Ledro, with a photographic itinerary enabling the reader to "virtually' enter the remaining worksites and listen to these spaces "tell" their stories after years of silence. A story in black and white, where the two tones are also messages for reading a complex story, one that it is important to remember.

Epidemiology of mesothelioma and historical background.

Mesothelioma is a "new" malignant disease strongly associated with exposure to amphibole asbestos exposure (amosite and crocidolite) environmentally and in the work place. Nonetheless, in recent years, we have learned that many cases of mesothelioma are idiopathic, while some are caused by therapeutic irradiation or chronic inflammation in body cavities. This paper reviews the key epidemiological features of the malignancy in the context of the biological and mineralogical factors that influence mesothelioma development. These tumors challenge the diagnostic pathologist's acumen, the epidemiologist's skill in devising meaningful and definitive studies, the industrial hygienist's knowledge of environmental hazards in diverse occupational settings, and the clinician's skill in managing an intrepid and uniformly fatal malignancy.