Public health experts in Australia have joined the global push to ban asbestos in developing countries.
A group of experts led by Professor Peter Sly of the Queensland Children’s Medical Research Institute has warned that the lives of millions of people are under threat through continuing use of the deadly substance.
In a report in the Medical Journal of Australia (www.mja.com.au/public/issues/193_04_160810/sly10582_fm.html), Prof Sly said that despite incontrovertible evidence of the effects of asbestos, annual world production remained at more than two million tons.
An estimated 125 million people in China, India, Russia, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Ukraine and Uzbekistan were still exposed to asbestos in their homes and at work. ”Thousands, if not millions, of people are likely to die in these countries as a result of continued asbestos exposure,” Prof Sly said.
He told the Australian Asbestos Network that most developed nations shared Australia’s anxiety about asbestos use in developing nations.
“The big problem is in Canada, where the industry maintains that the so-called white asbestos is not dangerous,” he said.
“This is not true and not accepted by the major health-related professional societies in Canada, but is a convenient argument that allows Canada to export asbestos to developing countries.”
He urged the Australian government to push for Canada’s signature on the Rotterdam Convention, an international treaty to regulate global trade in dangerous chemicals.
“There is a role for our government to lobby Canada and to point out their hypocrisy in continuing to export a product they know is harmful.”
Professor Sly is the only Australian fellow of the Collegium Ramazzini, an independent academic society of 180 of the world’s top public health experts that has repeatedly campaigned for a total ban on asbestos.
The co-authors of the MJA report included Robin Chase, president of the Australasian Faculty of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, John Kolbe, president of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and Professor Philip Thompson, head of the Lung Institute of Western Australia.
Story by Catherine Madden