Morris Greenberg

Statement in response to asbestos industry efforts to prevent a ban on asbestos in Pakistan: chrysotile asbestos use is not safe and must be banned.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the dangerous misinformation that the International Chrysotile Association is disseminating in its effort to defeat a proposed ban on asbestos in Pakistan. The International Chrysotile Association “actively represents the interest of Chrysotile Industry world over”.1 In a letter dated January 31, 2013 to Dr Mahmood A. Khwaja (Senior Adviser, Chemicals and Sustainable Industrial Development, Sustainable Development Policy Institute of Pakistan), the Chairman of the International Chrysotile Association (Mr Jean-Marc Leblond) expresses the opposition of that Association to the recommendation made, in January 2013, by the Pakistan National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Human Resource Development to ban the import and use of asbestos. Mr Leblond is a long-time salesman of asbestos. From 1986 to 2007, he was Vice President in charge of Sales for LAB Chrysotile Inc., a Quebec asbestos mining company. From 2008 to 2011, he was President of Chrysotile Canada Inc., the marketing agency for Quebec asbestos mining companies. He sat as a director of the discredited asbestos lobby organisation, the Chrysotile Institute. Presently, he is Presi-

The Defence of Chrysotile, 1912–2007

Abstract The commercial exploitation of asbestos may be dated from the late 1870s, when Canada was the major world source. Reports of severe and fatal respiratory disease in workers in asbestos factories appeared in Britain (1898,1906), and in France (1906) and Italy (1908). In 1912 the Canadian Department of Labour denied that the health of Quebecs millers and miners was affected. A series of denials appeared for over 40 years, until in 1955 a Thetford Mines medical officer reported finding that between 1945 and 1953, among some 4,000 asbestos workers 128 had asbestosis of various degrees of severity, 121 diagnosed radiographically, and 33 confirmed at autopsy. Although a committee of inquiry into health in the asbestos industry (1976), and a Royal Commission on health and safety arising in the use of asbestos in Ontario (1984) confirmed that disease had occurred, these findings were to have no adverse effects on asbestos exports. Rather, the inquiries constituted elements in the industrys successful public relations exercise that continues to operate to this day. Even when an increasing number of national bodies have legislated for total bans on asbestos use, a policy with which all the international bodies concerned with public health agree, the Canadian PR apparatus continues to be able to call on physicians and scientists prepared to oppose the consensuses reached by the independent advisors to these bodies.