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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Asbestos, lies and the State: occupational disease and South African science
Author:MacCulloch, Jock
Year:2005
Periodical:African Studies
Volume:64
Issue:2
Period:December
Pages:201-216
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:asbestos
occupational health
mining companies
Health and Nutrition
Labor and Employment
Politics and Government
External link:https://doi.org/10.1080/00020180500355694
Abstract:Asbestos can tell much about how the mining industry in South Africa has stage-managed medical knowledge to its advantage. In 1959, J.C. Wagner, a research fellow at the Pneumoconiosis Research Unit (PRU), was the first to establish the link between asbestos and what is the most lethal of the abestos-related diseases, mesothelioma, which was blighting asbestos mining communities in the Northern Cape. Wagner's discovery threatened the market for South African fibre at the very moment that the industry had invested heavily in new mines and mills. It also raised the problem of how the industry was to manage occupational and environmental disease. In South Africa the industry was so successful in stifling public debate that the mining of crocidolite or blue asbestos continued under the same hazardous conditions throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. As the result of legal settlements against asbestos companies in London and Pretoria in 2003, it is now possible to identify how the industry was able to set the agenda for occupational health on the mines. The present paper addresses this question. Bibliogr., notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]
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