wealth before health

SOYMB has previous posted on the disregard for workers health in the pursuit of profit and we make no apologies for doing so again. We read on the BBC website that Canada sent nearly 153,000 tonnes of chrysotile - or white asbestos - abroad, more than half went to India.

Despite still being mined in Quebec, Canada, white asbestos is now banned or restricted in some 52 countries, on the grounds that any form of asbestos can cause devastating illnesses. Countries like Russia, China, Brazil, and India - although not Canada - use it widely as a cheap and effective building material.
The Word Health Organisation says white asbestos "is a known cause of human cancer," including mesothelioma. The WHO says 125 million people encounter white asbestos in the workplace, and the International Labour Organization estimates that 100,000 workers die each year from all asbestos-related diseases. The president of the Quebec asbestos mine stated he did not believe these figures were true.

Dr Vincent Cogliano, of the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer says: "My own personal view is that these risks are extremely high. They are as high as just about any known carcinogen that we have seen, except, perhaps, for tobacco smoke. Any exposure is going to prolong the asbestos epidemic - continued export and continued use of chrysotile will increase the incidence of lung cancer and mesothelioma for many decades to come" .

Defenders of chrysotile insist safe use can prevent any ill effects including cancer - and some argue there's no link to mesothelioma at all. The asbestos lobby's strategy is one borrowed from the tobacco industry: create doubt, contest litigation, and delay regulation. Some industry-funded researchers have published hundreds of scientific papers saying that chrysotile can be used safely.

Despite the reassuring studies and the million-dollar marketing efforts arguments that white asbestos - more than 90% of all asbestos ever mined - can be safely used are disputed by the majority of scientists and public health officials.

John Hodgson of the UK's Health and Safety Executive said "I would say that we can't say it's safe,"

Alex Burdorf, a public health professor at Rotterdam's Erasmus Medical Centre, said his recent review of earlier epidemiological studies commissioned by the Dutch government, had convinced him that white asbestos was "much more dangerous than previously thought.What we have shown is that chrysotile is as dangerous as crocidolite [blue asbestos] for contracting lung cancer, and is also linked to mesothelioma. I don't think there is safe way of working with asbestos, so I would support a global ban on asbestos purely because of public health risks."


In the Indian city of Ahmedabad, families living in homes with cracked sheets of white asbestos, said they were aware of the dangers but were too poor to move.