By Lorraine Mallinder
BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent
12.12.09
BBC Turkey (in Turkish):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/turkce/izlenim/2009/12/091211_fooc_asbestos.shtml
English audio, introduced by Alan Johnston
Transcript
It used to snow twelve months a year in the town of Asbestos, they say. Folk here still remember how children would play in the fine white dust that spewed out from the nearby asbestos factory. “Look at us. We’re still alive!” says Lucie.The 61-year-old seems well. Indeed, people look resolutely fit in the vivid autumnal landscape. Solid brick houses with spotless gardens nestle under bright red and orange maple trees. You’d think it was a resort town.
The asbestos snow is long gone. The factory introduced dust control measures in the sixties. But the industry is being criticised for exporting to poor countries like Indonesia and Pakistan that seem less able or willing to afford decent protection for their workers.
Here in Asbestos, those faraway nations seem so distant they might as well be on another planet. But locals must be familiar with asbestos-related diseases like mesothelioma and asbestosis themselves. I want to know what they think.
Life in Asbestos revolves around the Jeffrey Mine, a monster of a pit that seems as big as the surrounding town. From here comes chrysotile, also known as white asbestos. It is less harmful than blue and brown asbestos, but is nonetheless a carcinogen shunned by most of the developed world.
Right now, production is spluttering to a close. But, owner Bernard Coulombe is frantically looking for investments that would allow workers to mine deep deposits for another fifty years. The future of the industry lies here.
He was caught short by the recent wave of bad publicity - which included a televised investigation showing Indian workers in a fog of asbestos with only bandanas for protection. But, Coulombe exhibits the irrepressible optimism of a true believer. “It was a frame-up,” he says.
He accepts that chrysotile is carcinogenic, but says it’s safe at low exposures and when mixed with resin, cement or tar. He also maintains that the mine only sells to companies with a proven safety record.
I ask about asbestos-related disease. Around eight miners a year claim compensation from the company for lung cancer, he says. But he doubts whether their illnesses were really caused by asbestos. “Above all, they are smokers,” he says.
In Asbestos, as I find out, disease is the elephant in the room. Quite simply, people do not want to utter a bad word against the life-saving substance that has in fact taken many of their own over the years. Lucie, whose father died a painful death from asbestosis, still defends asbestos with all her heart.
A local nurse of 30 years standing rolls her eyes when I mention the A-word. Rates of asbestos-related disease are no higher here than anywhere else, she says. I ask her where anywhere else is. But, she can’t offer any comparisons.
Why this determination to defend asbestos? After all, for a long time miners were told outrageous lies about their health by the industry. Right up to the seventies, doctors employed by the Johns-Manville Company, the former owner, routinely passed off cases of asbestosis as heart failure, remembers Claude Théroux at the local historical society.
It wasn’t until the workers’ union called in independent doctors that epidemic levels of asbestos-related disease were found. Yet, even knowing this historical injustice, Théroux still can’t fully place the blame on asbestos. The workers did all smoke, he says.
Evidently jobs matter, but there’s also a deeper emotional attachment to the white stuff. A miners’ strike of 1949 was a turning point in provincial history, an uprising against Anglophone masters that heralded the beginnings of Quebec separatism. Today, the industry is small, but sacred. It is also politically untouchable.
Théroux knew Pierre Laliberté, a local historian who had been writing a book about the town. I’d heard how he ran the Paris marathon in 1997 to prove to the world that chrysotile asbestos was not harmful. He’d worn a t-shirt proclaiming “on peut vivre en vainqueur” - we can live as winners. Just before my visit, I discover he recently died of a heart attack.
Théroux shows me boxes of research that Laliberté accumulated for his book, stacked in an airless room in the converted church premises. I feel I have to ask whether his death was asbestos-related. Théroux’s eyes bore into mine as he tells me there was no link with asbestos.
Official statistics show asbestos has made people sick. The province’s public health institute recorded “significant excesses” in deaths from asbestosis among men in the asbestos mining regions – Estrie and Chaudière-Appalaches -between 1981 and 2004. Chaudière-Appalaches, home of the nearby Thetford Mine, shows high rates of malignant mesothelioma for men and women.
Stephen McDougall, a local freelance journalist, thinks the studies are incomplete - they don’t include factors like heredity, environment, lifestyle and the length of fibres inhaled. This seems to take the hair-splitting to new extremes. I feel my head is about to explode.
Woefully, he tells me that journalists seldom visit. “They’re afraid,” he says. “The outside world sees us as a strange place, but we don’t give a damn.”