Asbestos-related disease in South Africa: The social production of an invisible epidemic

American Journal of Public Health

Volumn 96, Issue 8, 2006, Pages 1386-1396

  Braun, Lundy ^a   Kisting, Sophia ^b  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN   (South Africa)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ASBESTOSIS; ENVIRONMENTAL FACTOR; EPIDEMIC; HEALTH CARE POLICY; HUMAN; OCCUPATIONAL DISEASE; OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH; REVIEW; RURAL AREA; SOCIAL LIFE; SOCIAL WORK; SOUTH AFRICA; WORK ENVIRONMENT; ADOLESCENT; ADULT; ARTICLE; CHILD; ECONOMICS; EMPLOYMENT; ENVIRONMENTAL EXPOSURE; ETHNOLOGY; FEMALE; HISTORY; LEGAL ASPECT; MALE; MINING; NEGRO; OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURE; POLICY; POLITICAL SYSTEM; SOCIAL JUSTICE; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIAL STATUS; SOCIOECONOMICS; WORKPLACE;

ASBESTOS;

ADOLESCENT; ADULT; AFRICAN CONTINENTAL ANCESTRY GROUP; ASBESTOS; ASBESTOSIS; CAPITALISM; CHILD; COLONIALISM; EMPLOYMENT; ENVIRONMENTAL EXPOSURE; FEMALE; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; MALE; MINING; OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURE; PREJUDICE; PUBLIC POLICY; SOCIAL CONDITIONS; SOCIAL JUSTICE; SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS; SOUTH AFRICA; WORKPLACE;

EID: 33746763931     PISSN: 00900036     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2005.064998     Document Type: Review

References (131)

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3. Brown Matseke, Interview by Lundy Braun, July 5, 2004.
4. Phillip van Niekerk, "Blue and White Disaster," New Statesman, October 19, 1984. The longevity of the asbestos industry in South Africa is noteworthy. Crocidolite mining ceased in 1996, 30 years after the only other crocidolite-producing mine in the world at Wittenoom in Australia shut down. By 1965, British dockworkers were refusing to handle asbestos. By 1979, Sweden had banned the use of asbestos.
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9. E. L. Middleton, Report on the International Conference on Silicosis (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1931). George Frederick Slade's 1931 thesis, based on his studies on a chrysotile mine in the Transvaal was one of the most detailed descriptions of the clinical features and prevalence of asbestosis up to this time. Although the thesis was never published, it was conducted in collaboration with the South African Institute for Medical Research (SAIMR), a world-renowned research institute. His findings were thus undoubtedly widely disseminated internationally. Thirty years later, Wagner, Sleggs, and Marchand, established the link between mesothelioma and asbestos due to occupational and environmental exposure.
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18. As Charles E. Rosenberg has written, the notion of disease as specific physiologic entities, which structures almost every dimension of current medical practice and research, evolved during the last century. See, for example, "The Tyranny of Diagnosis: Specific Entities and Individual Experience," The Milbank Quarterly 80(2002): 237-260.
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24. Marianne Felix, Jean-Patrick Leger, Rodney Ehrlich, "Three Minerals, Three Epidemics-Asbestos Mining and Disease in South Africa," The Identification and Control of Environmental and Occupational Diseases: Asbestos and Cancer: Advances in Modem Environmental Toxicology, Vol. XXI, eds. M. Mehlman and J. Upton (Princeton: Princeton Scientific, 1993). 265-286; the northeastern Transvaal is now Limpopo Province, formerly the Northern Province.
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26. McCulloch, Asbestos Blues, 32.
27. Under the Population Registration Act of 1950, rescinded in 1991, the apartheid government created a political classification system that placed South Africans into one of the following categories: African/black, coloured, and European/white. In this paper, we use the term "black" in its political sense to refer to people who were historically disenfranchised by the apartheid government and by the even longer experience of colonial rule.
28. Hocking, Kaias & Cocopans, 40.
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30. Hocking, Kaias & Cocopans, 42-43;
31. J. Davies, B.G. Williams, M.A. Debeila, D.A. Davies, "Asbestos- related Lung Disease Among Women in the Northern Province of South Africa," South African Journal of Science 97(2001): 97:1-6;
32. McCulloch, Asbestos Blues, 143-164;
33. Nancy Jacobs, Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 135.
34. In Canada, it was old men and young boys who "cobbed" asbestos fibres, Ozonoff, "Failed Warnings: Asbestos-related Disease and Industrial Medicine," ed. Ronald Bayer The Health and Safety of Workers: Case Studies in the Politics of Professional Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 149.
35. William Beinart, Twentieth-century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 9-58;
36. Jacobs, Environment, Power, and Injustice, 76-95, 117-172.
37. McCulloch, Asbestos Blues, 24;
38. Jacobs, Environment, Power, and Injustice, 135-141.
39. McCulloch, Asbestos Blues, 98-99.
40. Beinart, Twentieth-century South Africa 17;
41. Jacobs, Environment, Power, and Injustice.
42. Beinart, Twentieth-century South Africa;
43. Jacobs, Environment, Power, and Injustice.
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45. McCulloch, Asbestos Blues, 27;
46. Jacobs, Environment, Power, and Injustice, 36-37.
47. Ozonoff, "Failed Warnings," 150-151.
48. Quoted in Hocking, Kaias & Cocopans, 41.
49. Hocking, Kaias & Cocopans, 67.
50. According to Hocking (Kaias and Cocopans, 80), another category of female worker, widows or "women without men," were not considered employees. They worked alone, scavenging for waste asbestos to sell to mining companies at the end of the month.
51. McCulloch, Asbestos Blues, 164.
52. Katholo Justice Senatle, Interview by Lundy Braun, July 4, 2004.
53. Brown Matseke, Interview.
54. Hall, Asbestos In the Union of South Africa;
55. Hocking, Kaias & Cocoans.
56. Davies et al,"Asbestos-related lung disease among women;"
57. Jock McCulloch, "Women mining asbestos in South Africa, 1893-1980, Journal of Southern African Studies 29(2003): 413-432.
58. Hocking, Kaias & Cocoans, 69.
59. Itumeleng Sethole, Interview by Lundy Braun, September 21, 2003.
60. Hocking, Kaias & Cocopans, 167-168.
61. Itumeleng Sethole, Interview.
62. Gloria Dikledi, Interview by Lundy Braun, September 21, 2003.
63. Brown Matseke, Interview.
64. Stephen Kotoloane, Interview by Lundy Braun, 21 September 21, 2003.
65. Anonymous worker, Interview by Lundy Braun, July 5, 2004.
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69. Katholo Justice Senatle, Interview.
70. CAWU merged with the NUM in 2000.
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83. Anonymous, Interview with Lundy Braun, July 5, 2004.
84. Brown Matseke, Interview.
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86. Members of Concerned People Against Asbestos, Interview with the Asbestos Collaborative, July 4, 2001.
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95. As Elaine Kate outlines in "White Workers' Grievances and the Industrial Colour Bar, 1902-1913," The South African Journal of Economics 42(1974): 127-156, the reasons for labor militancy in the period 1902 were complex. In addition to concerns about health, white miners objected to any relaxation of the colour bar, low wages, lack of recreation time, Sunday work, control of benefit funds, and the contract system of labor.
96. A. P. Cartwright, Doctors on the Mines: A History of the Mine Medical Officers' Association of South Africa (Cape Town: Purnell, 1971), 137;
97. Katz, The White Death, 113-116.
98. Middleton, Report on the International Conference, 9.
99. Cartwright, Doctors on the Mines, 38.
100. Kate, The White Death, 113;
101. Packard, White Plague, Black Labour: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 174-184.
102. Myers, "Asbestos and Asbestos-Related Disease," 48;
103. Felix, Leger, Ehrlich, "Three Minerals, Three Epidemics," 280.
104. This is not to imply that international standards were at that time or at the present adequate to compensate workers for the loss of their health.
105. Each of the asbestos-related diseases has a long and highly variable period between initial exposure to asbestos and the development of disease. Latency for asbestosis is approximately 15 years, depending on the level of exposure, for lung cancer approximately 20 years, and for mesothelioma between 20 and 50 years.
106. Residents of Gamopedi, Interview with the Asbestos Collaborative, 16 July 2001.
107. By monitoring workers differentially on the basis of race, the compensation system had the added effect of shaping whose disease was documented through research. Consequently, many of the most important longitudinal studies in South Africa involve only white workers. See, for example, George Sluis-Cremer and Eva Hnizdo, "Progression of irregular opacities in a group of asbestos miners who ceased exposure compared to a group who continued exposure." British Journal of Industrial Mediane 46(1989): 846-852.
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115. Felix, Leger, Ehrlich, "Three Minerals, Three Epidemics," 280. In his unpublished "Social and political Influences on the development of occupational health in South Africa since the 1880s," 2005, Rajen Naidoo makes this argument about occupational health legislation more broadly.
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