Asbestos is a general term applied to certain fibrous minerals long popular for their thermal resistance, tensile strength, and acoustic insulation properties. It is considered as one of the most widespread environmental hazards in the world, found in more than 3,000 manufactured products. All forms of asbestos can result in diseases such as asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma (LaDou, 2004).
For more than a century, South Africa was the major producer and third largest exporter of asbestos in theworld. Because the mining, milling, and manufacture of asbestos at that time were almost completely unregulated, South Africans who were exposed either in the work setting or through contamination of the environment are now plagued by a largely invisible epidemic of asbestos-related diseases. African men, women, and children worked under appalling conditions, without service contracts, medical care, housing rations, or any governmental regulation of exposure (Braun & Kisting, 2006).
Asbestos mining at that times was unique in that women and children were essential to both production and profit. Extraction of fiber from the host rock was done by women at the mine sites in a process called cobbing. Women workers were paid as part of their husbands’ wages, they received no medical attention and were not reported to the Department of Mining as employees (Waldman, 2003). Children frequently bagged loose asbestos. Cobbing and bagging involved intensive exposure to dry airborne asbestos, but because women and children were rarely registered as miners, the extent of their disease was and remains poorly documented.
Asbestos exposure affects not only asbestos workers but also their families, users of asbestos products, and the public as it is exposed to building materials and asbestos in heating and ventilating systems. In developing countries such as those that comprise South Africa, where protection of workers and communities is scant or nonexistent, an epidemic of asbestos-related diseases may be even more devastating than it has been in developed countries. The battle against asbestos is in danger of being lost where the human costs may be greatest, in developing countries desperate for industry (LaDou, 2004).
The work environment, labor policies, and occupational-healthframework of the asbestos industry in South Africa during the20th century has definitely been a lack on the part of the government, but the blame is actually shared with the manufacturers and appropriate groups. Manufacturers shared information across geographical and political boundaries; and prominent medical journals reviewed current research regarding asbestos-related diseases. However, without environmental lobbies and consumer groups to petition for people’s rights, governments took little interest in occupational health (Waldman, 2003).
The epidemic of asbestos-related disease in South Africa is also said to be a direct consequence of the complex alliances among scientific researchers in South Africa and Britain, the multinational asbestos industry, and the South African government to suppress medical knowledge about asbestos. Most mining companies downplayed medical evidence of disease, emphasized factory safety and new technologies of dust control, while at the same time disguising the loss of health of many of their workers and families.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment