The world has known about the dangers of asbestos for a very long time. As early as the 1920′s the international medical community was beginning to agree that asbestos fibers did indeed pose a serious threat to human health. A report that was published around that time in Britain, later known as the Merewether report, detailed a health investigation that examined 360 people that worked at an asbestos textile plant. The report discovered that nearly a quarter of the plant workers suffered from severe shortness of breath due to scarring of the lungs and soft tissues around the lungs, a condition known at the time as pulmonary fibrosis.
A few short years later in 1930 doctors in the United States cited tumors from asbestos related diseases as the cause of death in several autopsies, marking the first times that asbestos related deaths were officially recorded. In the same year many persons working in the asbestos mining and milling industry began filing worker’s compensation claims. These events incited a reaction from the asbestos industry, which began actively denying the risks of the substance to protect their profits. The industry officials often went as far as paying off victims in return for not going public with their disease, editing investigative reports and launching huge and expensive counter-campaigns to maintain the public’s acceptance and approval of the industry. Many of these practices still go on today.
Today mesothelioma, a terminal cancer caused by asbestos exposure, is diagnosed roughly 3,000 times every year in the United States alone, and the diagnoses are growing. The obvious dangers of asbestos and the irresponsibility of the asbestos industry have led to the shutdown of an overwhelming majority of asbestos mining operations, and bans and strict regulations concerning safe handling of the substance being instated. Considering the fact that asbestos is so obviously a hazard to human health, it makes sense that many governments across the world have called for a total ban on the substance in every industry. Oddly, that’s not the case in Canada.
Since the early 1980′s, Ottowa, Canada has spent more than $20 million on PR campaigns bent on improving asbestos’s acceptance by the public. The campaigns are, overall, fairly effective, as Canada remains the world’s second largest asbestos producer. Thetford Mines, Quebec, is the home of the largest asbestos mining operation on all of North America, as well as a population of 26,000. Canada itself still maintains fairly strict regulations on the use of the substance withing the country; the vast majority of the asbestos and asbestos products are exported to poorer, developing nations that cannot afford safer building materials.
