Mesothelioma Lawyers: Until recently, the story of mesothelioma within South Africa has been dismal. More than 2700 South Africans are documented as having died of mesothelioma. Government officials failed to prevent the disease and protect citizens. Mine owners focused excessively on profit. The legal system has offered no practical means of redress for patients with mesothelioma resulting from environmental exposure, and the medical community has had minimal impact on policy and/or practice. Some recent developments are more encouraging. There has been a concerted focus by the South African legislature on asbestos-related matters. New and more stringent asbestos control regulations exist under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. Asbestos is no longer mined in South Africa and the government has an active programmer of rehabilitating mine dumps. Cape pic, a UK asbestos mining company that left South Africa in 1976, is being sued by more than 5000 former South African employees suffering from asbestos-related diseases in a court case in London. Hopefully, future prospects in mesothelioma prevention and treatment will offer hope to those who are still at risk.
Amosite is a pale silvery fibrous mineral which is also called brown asbestos. Asbestos Mines of South Africa Ltd. first mined the fiber at the turn of the twentieth century. It occurs mainly in the area of Penge and has been mined there for the past 80 years, mainly with small operations and crude technologies, causing extensive environmental pollution and exposing the labor force to high levels of dust. The Penge deposit is the largest in the world, and stretches for 40 km (25 miles) Asbestos mining reached its peak in South Africa in 1977, when more than 380 000 tons was exported and 20 000 miners were employed. Asbestos is no longer mined in South Africa. However, given the latency period for mesothelioma, all those exposed during the 1970s and 1980s will be approaching the peak for their risk of this disease. Therefore it can be expected that the mesothelioma epidemic in South Africa will continue at least for the lifetime of those large numbers of people exposed to amphibole asbestos in mining, in industry, and environmentally.
The major types of asbestos encountered in South Africa are crocidolite, chrysotile, and amosite. Hausman, a German geologist, coined the name crocidolite in 1831 from the Greek krokis (woolly) and lithos (rock). Also known as blue asbestos, crocidolite was first discovered in South Africa in 1805 and was originally named ‘woolstone’. All commercial asbestos fibers were mined in South Africa. South African mining of crocidolite began in the mid-nineteenth century. Initially, the mining took place with many small digging operations, ‘outcrop mining’. The mining and milling processes are highly labor intensive, with the fiber cobbled from the rock by hand-held hammers, sieved by hand, sorted by a combination of manual and mechanized methods, and transported in hessian sacks. Crocidolite is less heat resistant than other forms of asbestos, but very acid resistant as well as very elastic. It is used mainly as a reinforcing agent for binding with cement, rubber, and plastics, friction materials (brake linings), packing, and jointing products. The last crocidolite mine closed in 1994.
The link between asbestos and mesothelioma was established in the Kimberley area in the Northern Cape region in South Africa. In 1956, Wagner performed a necropsy on a black male shower attendant at a gold mine. He was surprised to find a tumor filling the right chest with collapsed lung in the centre. Tuberculosis had been endemic in the area, but antituberculous treatment, which was introduced in 1952, had a dramatic effect, except for cases from the area west of Kimberley. In 1956, C. A. Sleggs, the Chief Medical Officer of Kimberley Tuberculosis Hospital, collected the radiographs of 14 patients with a similar history. These were biopsied and showed mesothelioma. Most cases lived in the vicinity of asbestos mines. A long latent period with up to 44 years between exposure and mesothelioma was noted. Wagner reported the link between asbestos and mesothelioma in 1960.
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