Scientists call on federal government of Canada to release asbestos study

Two internationally recognized experts who contributed to a Health Canada study on the cancer risks of asbestos are appealing to the federal health minister to make their report public.


The federal agency hired seven scientific and medical experts from around the world last November to examine the risks.

After submitting their report in March, the experts said they were told it would be made public within weeks, but it still hasn't been released.

Health Minister Tony Clement's office told the CBC the report will be made public once his officials have reviewed it.

Leslie Stayner, head of the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois, as well as Trevor Ogden, the chair of the panel of experts, have each written letters to Clement decrying the delay.

"It is simply unacceptable for this report to continue to be withheld from the public, while individuals who have seen the report and our comments make erroneous allegations about what it contains to suit their political objectives," Stayner wrote in his letter.

Last week, Bloc Québécois MP André Bellavance rose in the House of Commons to argue against growing calls to ban chrysotile, a form of asbestos, implying Health Canada's new study supports his view.

Both Stayner and Ogden, however, said the panel was never asked its opinion on whether a ban on any form of asbestos was appropriate, and that it was only charged with examining the relative potency of exposure to chrysotile versus other forms of asbestos, and how best to estimate the risk of cancer from exposure.

"I want to make the record clear that nothing in the report would argue against the sensibility of an asbestos ban in Canada or for that matter anywhere else in the world," Stayner told CBC.

Canada is the only developed nation still producing asbestos, called a deadly threat by the International Labour Organization, the World Health Organization, the International Association for Cancer Research and many more health agencies.

The Canadian government believes asbestos is safe if handled properly and has spent nearly $20 million in the past two decades to promote exports of the mineral, almost all of it going to developing nations such as India, Indonesia and Pakistan for use in construction material.
Labour congress wants compensation for miners

Michel Arsenault, president of the Quebec Federation of Labour, in February convinced his colleagues at the Canadian Labour Congress not to call for a ban on asbestos mining until after the Health Canada study was completed and made public.

Even though that hasn't happened, the executive council of the CLC passed a resolution on the weekend on behalf of its members calling for an end to asbestos production, as well as economic transition support for the roughly 700 Quebec asbestos miners who would be affected by a shutdown of the industry.

In his letter, Stayner said that while the panel was not asked to rule on whether chrysotile asbestos can be used safely, "from a pragmatic point of view, my answer to this question would be that it [safe use] is simply not possible."

Quebec's asbestos industry includes Canada's only two asbestos mines. The province has one of the highest rates of mesothelioma — cancer almost always related to asbestos exposure — in the world.

Asbestos has been banned by nearly every developed country, as well as a growing number of developing nations. The World Health Organization has estimated as many as 100,000 people around the world die annually from asbestos-related diseases.

May 26, 2008
CBC

Health panel reports on chrysotile Asbestos withheld by Canadian government

Health Canada's panel reports on chrysotile asbestos have been withheld by the government and misrepresented in Parliament, provoking panel epidemiologist Leslie Stayner to give an interview to CBC which was aired on 24th May, 2008. Also, panel chairman Trevor Ogden publicly blasted Health Canada for withholding the reports (below).

CBC WORLD REPORT - LINK TO SHOW OF
SATURDAY MAY 24 - GOOD TILL 0500 EDT (GMT -5) SUNDAY MAY 25

http://www.cbc.ca/worldreport/latestshow.html


From: "Trevor Ogden"
To:
Sent: Saturday, May 24, 2008 2:10 PM
Subject: Chrysotile Report delay


The Honourable Tony Clement
Minister of Health
Ottawa

Dear Minister

I was chair of the expert panel convened by
Health Canada last November to report on the
health risks of chrysotile asbestos.

Professor Leslie Stayner has written to you (at
Clement.T@parl.gc.ca) about the delay in issuing
the reports of the Panel. I share his
concern. Health Canada is already committed to
issuing the reports on the Web without
alteration, and the main reports have been with
Health Canada for over two months. I was a civil
servant myself for 19 years, and know the
importance for a government to be able to give a
plausible policy reaction to a report; but I also
know that consultation and preparation of such a
response only needs to take about 12 hours. The
two months delay is inexplicable.

On 12th May, André Bellavance made a statement in
the House which clearly implied that the Report
supports controlled use for chrysotile as opposed
to a ban. As Professor Stayner says, this
question was not addressed by the Panel, and Mr
Bellavance's statement misrepresents it. I do
not believe that he has seen the report, but he
is exploiting the uncertainty to promote his own
views. This kind of thing can only increase with time.

In this delay, Health Canada is breaking faith
with the scientists who took part in the
panel. You will know that Canada has a pretty
bleak reputation in most of the health science
world, and those who took part in the Panel were
risking reputations with their colleagues. I
believe that we all took part because this did
seem an honest attempt by Health Canada to
understand what degree of consensus and range of
opinions existed, as a basis for policy. We are
now all constrained not to reveal what is in the
report, but cannot give any reasonable explanation for the delay.

I do urge you both as Minister of Health and
Chair of the Cabinet's Social Affairs Committee
to see that the reports are made public
forthwith. I believe that the authoritative
scientific opinions which they contain will
strengthen Canada in this field, and ensure that
its policies are on a sound scientific base.

Yours sincerely
Trevor Ogden

Dr TL Ogden
Chair, Health Canada Expert Panel on Chrysotile Asbestos
ogden@ogs.org.uk

Exposing humans to Asbestos, human rights violation

Exposing any human being to asbestos is a blatant case of human rights violation becasue it causes preventable but incurable diseases like Asbestosis, Mesothelioma and Lung Cancer.

An epedemic of asbestos diseases in EU, UK, US, Australia, Japan and several other countries has set the aalarm bell ringing. But Indian government would have its citizens- both workers and consumers of asbestos products-believe that Indians are immune to asbestos disease as if this killer fiber becomes automatically non-poisonous and non-carcinogenic as soon as it enters Indian borders.

So far 50 countries have banned all kinds of asbestos including chrysotile (white asbestos) variety.

Indeed, "The widespread use of asbestos in India is a matter of global concern. It is a silent killer and its use in water-pipes and roofing material is being phased out. It can lead to a rare form of mesolithelioma cancer, and is linked to lung cancer. Asbestos fibres are so light that they remain suspended in the air and are easily inhaled.

The International Labour Organisation has estimated that asbestos kills one lakh people worldwide every year. A study in India has shown that more than 6000 workers are affected by asbestosis (an incurable lung ailment)." (Special Article, 30 May, 2008, Y P Gupta, THe Statesman) It is noteworthy that the US Senate has passed the Ban Asbestos America Act 2007. While "The Supreme Court has ruled that an asbestos worker's right to health and medicare during service and after retirement is a fundamental right under the Constitution" but this right has been violated by the Indian government by making asbestos products artificially cheaper. Russians and Canadians are dumping their asbestos raw material in India with the active promotion by the Union Commerece Ministry.

The ILO Resolution of 14th June 2006 calls for elimination asbestos since no "safe" and "controlled" use of asbestos and asbestos products is possible. The WTO Appellate Body in the Canada vs European Comunitiy also upheld the right of France to ban asbestos since no safe use is possible. Unmindful of this in India, Asbestos consumption is rising at an alarming rate causing estimated 30 deaths every day. And given the fact that asbestos studies in National Institute of Occupational Health, the only agency authorised to certify incuarable asbestos diseases is admittedly funded by asbestos industry, the number Indian asbestos victims would continue to rise without discrimination to the class of people.

Asbestos is a ticking Time Bomb.

Doubts over asbestos cancer chemotherapy

Chemotherapy treatments which aim to prolong patients' lives and reduce suffering from asbestos-related cancer do not work, UK researchers suggest.

Mesothelioma, caused by asbestos exposure, is usually incurable, but some specialists hope chemo could delay death and improve quality of life.

The study in the Lancet found hundreds of patients saw no benefit.

However, a US expert said other combinations of chemotherapy drugs could work better.

Despite legislation controlling the use of asbestos, there are approximately 2,000 deaths from mesothelioma in the UK every year.

Any treatment can have serious side effects for patients and these findings highlight that people should not have treatment that is not of proven benefit
Kate Law Cancer Research UK

The decades-long delay between exposure and the onset of the disease, means numbers are expected to keep rising for at least half a decade.

Treatment for mesothelioma is aimed principally at reducing its symptoms, and hopefully slowing down the progression of the illness.

It is generally recommended that patients are given steroid drugs and radiotherapy sessions.

No proof

The latest study looked at 409 patients, mainly from the UK, who were all given these standard treatments.

Some were additionally given doses of chemotherapy, and the effect on their disease compared.

While the chemotherapy patients did live slightly longer on average than those given just standard treatment, the researchers said the finding did not represent statistical proof, and could be misleading.

There was no improvement in quality of life among the chemotherapy patients.

One of the authors of the study, Dr Richard Stephens from the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit, said: "While thousands are and will be affected by this deadly disease, our trial, which is one of the few large trials ever conducted in this disease, emphasises how difficult mesothelioma is to treat.

"This is mainly because mesothelioma forms in the lining of the lung. This makes it hard to target."

Kate Law, Cancer Research UK's director of clinical trials, added: "These results showed no real benefit from adding these chemotherapy drugs compared with just treating the symptoms of the disease.

"Any treatment can have serious side effects for patients and these findings highlight that people should not have treatment that is not of proven benefit."

However, one US-based expert said that results from other trials into chemotherapy had been more positive.

Dr Nicholas Vogelzang, from the Nevada Cancer Institute, also writing in The Lancet, said that different combinations of drugs had, in one study, meant that half the patients involved survived a year or more.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7402650.stm

Asbestos hotzone

Petrochemical heartland home to vigilant MDs

The Sarnia area is home to several large industrial plants. According to a report by Ecojustice, evidence suggests the local environment— and the health of its residents—has been severely compromised.

In Sarnia, Ontario, caregivers are constantly on guard for workplace-related health problems, while advocating for a cleaner community

SARNIA, ONTARIO. | It isn’t very often that a small medical clinic gets credit in a high-profile report by an influential environmental group.

But then few clinics are as focused on the health impact of a specific area’s environmental and workplace pollutants as the Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers (OHCOW) office in Sarnia, Canada’s petrochemical heartland.

Sarnia’s roughly 75,000 residents contend with arguably the worst air pollution in the country, according to the report published in October by Toronto-based Ecojustice (formerly the Sierra Legal Defence Fund).

To whit: According to industry data compiled by Environment Canada and cited by Ecojustice, there are 46 large effluence-emitting industrial plants in Ontario within 25 km of Sarnia. On the U.S. side of the St. Clair River, the body of water on which Sarnia sits, there are 16 similar facilities. In 2005, the Canadian smokestacks alone emitted more than 5 million kg of pollutants deemed to be toxic, Ecojustice said.

“The toll these emissions are taking is dramatic and there is growing evidence that the health of the residents of Sarnia and the Aamjiwnaang First Nation (a Sarnia-area reserve), and the local environment has been severely compromised,” said Ecojustice.

Yet while that report focused on the air pollution, all elements of Sarnia’s natural surroundings are affected by the region’s concentration of heavy industry. As a result, the OHCOW clinicians “see no distinction between the ambient environment and the workplace,” when they contemplate the health of the region’s population, said Dr. James Brophy, (PhD), executive director of the Sarnia office.

It is because of that lack of distinction that Dr. Brophy, who is also an occupational and environmental cancer researcher, and his physician colleagues decided to work with Ecojustice, he explained in an interview.

“We believe Ecojustice has performed an important public health role in alerting the community about the extent of environmental exposures emanating from the petrochemical industry,” said Dr. Brophy.

OHCOW is a six-city clinic, born of the provincial labour movement in the late 1980s, and specializes in handling workplace-related health problems. Its physician services and office overhead are largely funded by the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.

While OCHOW’s core patient population is current and past workers of the major industries, its Sarnia health professionals worry about the risks the wider Sarnia population faces, including outdoor workers such as construction crews, landscapers and home remodellers, people “who are out there in this environment every day,” said Dr. Brophy.

Despite clear and ample evidence that much of Sarnia’s population faces a frightening day-to-day reality as a result of the pollution, the doctors must nevertheless keep their medical objectivity.

Dr. Abe Reinhartz, a general practitioner here, explained “patients often come to us with undifferentiated health complaints, and they are interested in exploring whether or not there is a workplace connection.”


A worker memorial stands guard in Sarnia.
He continued, “Often, we can make a diagnosis here of some other ailment that is not work-related, and get patients to communicate with their primary-care physician or initiate a referral ourselves to get a problem sorted out.”

Dr. Reinhartz noted that despite their concerns about Sarnia’s pollution, for physicians such as himself, “it is not so easy to clinically tease out the environmental exposures in terms of health effects in an individual.”

He said wider, epidemiological studies are better suited to revealing those negative health implications of pollution than individual patient investigations.

Dr. Reinhartz, for one, doesn’t see himself and his colleagues as environmental activists as the term is popularly understood, despite their involvement with Ecojustice and an Aamjiwnaang environmental committee, but more as “patient advocates for their medical-legal rights.”

The OHCOW doctors said their public profile has led to occasional negative feedback from other doctors, ones who to Dr. Reinhartz “are paid by corporate entities to provide medical services and are very willing to toe the party line.”


“We should be aiming for zero emissions or zero releases, and supporting industry in that way.”
—Dr. John Howard
Real-world laboratory
For Dr. John Howard, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University of Western Ontario Schulich School of Medicine in London, Ont., Sarnia, in Ontario’s extreme southwest, offers an unintentionally perfect real-world laboratory for bringing home the lessons of the ecosystem health courses he teaches to his school’s medical students.

Dr. Howard, who has been to Sarnia many times and works closely with Sarnia’s OHCOW clinic, recalled grimly an image that to him typifies the plight of the area. On the Aamjiwnaang reserve, “right by the river . . . there is this sign that says, ‘Doing anything in this water is toxic.’ ”

Ecosystem health is geared toward training doctors to “think of (a patient’s) health in a very broad sense . . . to try to think of the sickness in the human as a symptom of the environment.”

In February, the governing federal Conservatives, a party critics say is not given to especially sensitive views on the environment, called the St. Clair River “severely contaminated,” especially immediately downstream of Sarnia, and would spend up to $3.3 million to clean it up.

Dr. Howard said he believed the river clean up would have a benefit for Sarnia, but “we should be aiming for zero emissions or zero releases, and supporting industry in that way.”

The Sarnia OCHOW clinic spends a lot of time dealing with what Dr. Brophy called the largest documented cohort of asbestos diseases—patients with pleural plaques, asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma—in Canada. Asbestos, a high-profile pollutant in the 1970s and 1980s, remains a major environment-related killer in Sarnia. “There is barely a blue-collar family that hasn’t been directly affected or doesn’t know somebody who has.”

Asbestos is so prevalent in some parts of the city that the soil is toxic. Dr. Reinhartz’s colleague, Dr. James Mackenzie, recounted how several years ago the province proposed a new offramp of Highway 402 in an asbestos hotzone. The clinic’s doctors took part in a community (and government) awareness-raising campaign about the soil’s toxicity.

The offramp was eventually built, but the ground was treated like the toxic waste site it was: The area needed to be decontaminated by construction crews who had to don hazmat gear, while their equipment—even their trucks and tractors—needed to be constantly scrubbed down, recalled the doctors.

They physicians have also taken other high-visibility roles, such as after a news release in 2000 in Sarnia, “publicly indicating what the risks of benzene exposure are,” among other things.

Matthew Sylvain
May 06, 2008
www.medicalpost.com

Canadian PM's residence needs $10 million to remove Asbestos

Note: The official residence of the Canadian Prime Minister is riddled with asbestos. Some people think it should be removed, I think he should be locked in there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until he agrees to ban the use of asbestos in Canada and the export of asbestos from Canada!

---------------------------------------------------------------Laurie Kazan-Allen

PM's residence needs $10 million in repairs

Updated Wed. May. 7 2008

CTV.ca News

The prime minister and his family may have to pack up and find a new temporary home if they heed the advice of Canada's auditor general.

A report released by Sheila Fraser on Tuesday states that "24 Sussex Drive (is) showing signs of fatigue and wear, and (requires) extensive repair work."

The repairs are estimated to cost about $10 million, and the report notes that "prolonged access to 24 Sussex Drive will be required for rehabilitation of the residence." That would require the prime minister and his family to move out for up to 15 months.

On CTV's Mike Duffy Live, Fraser listed off a number of repairs that need to be made. She said:
The windows are extremely old
There is a lot of asbestos in the house
The residence does not have a sprinkler system

"The list goes on and on," Fraser said.

"We note in the report that there have been no repairs to 24 Sussex in 50 years. I think we can all appreciate in our own homes that you have to do this regular upgrading and maintenance on a very frequent basis," she said.

John Williamson of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation says he doesn't believe most people will have a problem with making the repairs. But he said what politicians should be concerned about is going over budget, as has been the case with similar public projects in the past. He also said the $10 million price tag for repairs may baffle some taxpayers.

"You see this cost and Canadians think, 'What on Earth will they be putting in to 24 Sussex that it would cost so much,'" Williams said on Mike Duffy Live.

Fraser said that 24 Sussex and Rideau Hall -- which Fraser's report said needs some repairs to its exterior -- are not like regular homes.

"They also have official functions and so require very particular facilities ... There are systems that go in there that would not go into an ordinary home," Fraser said.

Harper has said he thinks 24 Sussex is in adequate condition for now and that he has no plans to move out before the next election.

Some facts on 24 Sussex:

Built in 1866 by a private owner who was also a member of parliament
Called "Gorffwysta" or "place of rest" by its original owner
Purchased by the government in 1943
Situated on 4 acres of property along the Ottawa River
The building has 34 rooms
Pierre Trudeau added a swimming pool
Kim Campbell has been the only prime minister not to live in the residence since Ottawa purchased the home

Stop exporting asbestos

While Canadians take great care to ensure its own safety against dangerous asbestos, Canada remains a leading exporter of this killer substance to places like India and Pakistan.

I humbly request you solidity with workers in India and the global south. I appeal to you to stop exporting asbestos; 95 per cent of Canada's asbestos is exported to India and other countries where it is handled by desperately poor workers under dangerous conditions. It is creating a public health tragedy of diseases and death.

More than 100,000 workers are exposed to asbestos daily in India and are falling sick and dying from Canadian chrysotile asbestos. It is not just the workers who suffer, their families bear the burden of disease, too, by losing their sole breadwinner and are left destitute.

Mr. Prime Minister, I appeal to you to listen to their plea and support the health and lives of workers in India and the global south. They have few protections and they need your help. On Feb. 5, all the major trade unions of India and labour support groups called for a ban on asbestos. Please listen to the voices of those workers in India.

The government of South Africa, which was a major supplier of the chrysotile asbestos, has just stopped doing so. If the government of South Africa can put the lives of people ahead of the interest of the asbestos industry why cannot the Canadian government do the same?

On Feb. 20, despite pressure from Canadians, the Canadian Labour Congress put a hold on banning asbestos mining. Roughly 700 people work in Quebec's asbestos industry. Canada is the only developed nation still producing the mineral chrysolite which is unacceptable. A call for a total ban is long overdue.

Dr. T. M. Abraham
Welland Tribune