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Defending the Indefensible: Book Review
By asbestoshub | August 21, 2008
A book, due out in late August 2008 by Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale, Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and Its Fight for Survival discusses the problems of asbestos in the environment, compensating victims, and the continued use of asbestos in the developing world. The book is based on documentary material gained from legal discovery, supplemented by evidence from the authors’ visits and researches in the US, the UK, Canada, Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, Australia, Swaziland, and South Africa.
This is the first global history of how the asbestos industry and its allies in government, insurance, and medicine defended the product throughout the twentieth century, despite hazards to humans. It explains how mining and manufacture continued despite overwhelming medical evidence as to the risks. The argument advanced in this book is that asbestos has proved so enduring because the industry was able to mount a successful defense strategy for the mineral which involved the shaping of the public debate by censoring, and sometimes corrupting, scientific research, nurturing scientific uncertainty, and using allies in government, insurance, and medicine.
The book was introduced during a recent town meeting in Rochdale, UK. Rochdale is the birthplace of the Turner & Newall asbestos factory. First using chrysotile fibre from Quebec, asbestos production began in Rochdale in the 1870s and continued until the 1990s.
The site is at present, subject to a controversial planning application to build more than 600 homes and a children’s nursery.
Many in the audience had worked at the asbestos factory and had lost loved ones to asbestos related disease. Knowing now how asbestos has affected so many, there was anger towards Turner & Newall’s attitude.
The audience was shocked when a further presentation of photographs and documents demonstrated that Turner & Newall had early knowledge of asbestos related disease and cancer in Rochdale.
The daughter-in-law of Nellie Kershaw, who was the world’s first attributed asbestosis death, was in the audience to hear how Turner & Newall refused to pay funeral expenses in 1924 to Nellie’s grieving widower. A management memo stated that to do so ‘would create a precedent and admit responsibility’.
The Turner & Newall archives show that the first mesothelioma death occurred in its Rochdale factory in 1936. In 1942 a Rochdale Inquest heard: “There have been so many of these cases in Rochdale that I must say I think the cancer was produced by the asbestosis.”
Confidential company documents from 1957 confirm that a huge amount of asbestos waste was dumped and that the air surrounding the factory was even dustier than inside the factory production areas. Yet a 1961 Turner & Newall letter confirms the company knew ‘that the only really safe number of fibres in the work’s atmosphere is nil.’
At the Town Hall event, shocked former Turner & Newall workers vowed that history should not repeat itself in the developing world. Although asbestos in now banned in the UK and EU it is still being peddled into emerging markets in Asia. It has not yet been banned in the US and Canada is still an active exporter of chrysotile asbestos.
