TUESDAY, 4.30PM
The special Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing into the role of the medical profession in apartheid human rights abuses on Tuesday heard that asbestos mining companies suppressed the findings of scientific research in the 1960s into the health risks of exposure to asbestos.
The claim was made as part of the submission by the Health and Human Rights Project on health-related human rights abuses.
In the 1960s the pneumoconiosis research unit of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research began investigating the relationship between asbestos and cancer. The findings by Professor Ian Webster, published in a confidential report on April 30, 1962, showed that the risk of contracting asbestosis in the abestos mining areas was extremely high. Webster said he had found “an alarmingly high” number of cases of mesothelioma of the pleura among people who lived or had lived in the north-western Cape area. There was evidence, he said, that this condition was associated with exposure to asbestos dust.
Webster recommended that the industry, together with the Department of Mining, immediately take steps to assess existing dust control measures and disposal methods. According to the HHRP, the mining companies refused to sanction the publication of Webster’s finding unless the cancer hazard was “passed off” as tuberculosis. “The report was therefore not published or made available outside the unit, except to the groups that had been directly involved in the survey.”
In another instnace in the 1970s, the national research institute for occupational diseases of the Medical Research Council of South Africa carried out research on the risks of asbestos-related diseases in workers in asbestos mines, which showed that the risk of death through asbestosis or cancer of the lungs and stomach was increased in blue asbestos mining areas. The HHRP said the findings were due to have been presented at a conference of the New York Academy of Sciences in June 1978. However, the two researchers were instructed to withdraw their paper.
“There is evidence that this instruction … was issued at the request of the asbestos mining companies in the Northern Cape, who wanted to prevent evidence of a link between blue asbestos and cancer being disclosed.” The study was subsequently reworked and released only in 1986.