Re: Response to criticisms of “lung cancer case-control study of beryllium workers” Am. J. Ind. Med. 2001. 39:133–144.

To the Editor: Dr. David Deubner et al. have criticized our nested case-control study of the association between beryllium exposure and lung cancer [Sanderson et al., 2001a]. In this study, we estimated the beryllium exposures of workers in a beryllium alloy production plant from the 1940s through the 1970s in order to conduct an exposure-response analysis. A manuscript describing how these exposure estimates were determined was published as a companion paper [Sanderson et al., 2001b]. The following are our responses to these criticisms.