Quebec continues to export more than 170,000 tons of asbestos annually to developing nations despite the fact that the World Health Organization considers the substance a serious health risk and acknowledges its connection with certain forms of cancer. Quebec’s Premier, Jean Charest, has received much criticism for continuing to mine the mineral and export it to countries such as India, Mexico, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
An editorial published last week in the Montreal based newspaper The Gazette accuses Charest’s policy of being “deeply immoral.” The editorial continues to say that the asbestos industry is a far cry from vital to Canada’s economic welfare and that a complete ban on the substance’s mining and export would only impact the province of Quebec temporarily. Quebec’s asbestos industry employs just around one thousand people, but the export of the dangerous substance could harm or even kill untold numbers of workers in developing nations.
Jean Charest argues that handling asbestos safely greatly reduces the risk of contamination that could lead to mesothelioma or an array of other rare cancers, and that the responsibility to prevent health hazards lies in the hands of the importing nations and their companies which implement the products. Sufficient safe handling practices in developing nations are rarely used, however, and mesothelioma diagnoses are consistently rising worldwide.
Approximately 90,000 people around the world die every year from asbestos related diseases. Many diseases caused by the substance, such as mesothelioma, can take several decades to fully develop from the time of exposure until tumors are formed that begin causing troublesome symptoms. This latency period has a numbing effect on the worldwide awareness of the disease and the willingness of some governments to consider it a present threat. The health hazards that asbestos present were documented as early as the 1930′s, but commercial interest in the substance and the tendency for its victims to be dissociated with the industry by the time their symptoms began slowed the creation and enforcement of restrictions regarding asbestos’s use and handling.
Today, the substance is entirely banned throughout the European Union and under heavy regulation in the United States, Canada and several other developed nations. Developing nations which are filling the market vacuum created by widespread asbestos bans throughout the end of the twentieth century are at an incredibly high risk of increasing injury and death due to the mineral. Unfortunately, the consequence of the prolific use of asbestos products is unlikely to show its face in increased cancer diagnoses for several decades, possibly delaying further government action that could reduce exposure and contamination.
