Asbestos exposure and incidence of disease among a group of former chrysotile asbestos miners and millers from Baie Verte, NL, Canada

• Main Author: Giles Murphy, Tina Linda
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Memorial University of Newfoundland 2015
• Subjects: Newfoundland; Canada; Verte; Baie Verte
• Online Access: https://research.library.mun.ca/11629/; https://research.library.mun.ca/11629/1/thesis.pdf

Asbestos is one of the most well-known and extensively studied occupational hazards. Over the past century, the health effects of asbestos exposure have been studied in thousands of books, journal articles, and media publications, from all over the world. Despite the vast amount of knowledge that exists about asbestos there continues to be controversy about the relative health risks associated with its different types, that is, serpentine (chrysotile) and amphibole asbestos fibres. The continued production and use of chrysotile asbestos in many countries around the world, as well as the ongoing exposure of millions of workers globally to asbestos, has kept it a subject of ongoing debate and concern. Although asbestos is a well-established cause of both malignant and non-malignant disease, a number of recent meta-analyses have sought to estimate the relative risk of diseases related to exposure to each of the different fibre types. The lack of epidemiological studies with good quality exposure assessments, particularly in the mining/milling industry, as well as the lack of retrospective exposure assessments for most cohorts, has led to an over-reliance on studies of a single population of chrysotile-only exposed cohorts: the Québec chrysotile miners/millers cohort. These studies, however, have been criticized as being heavily influenced by the asbestos industry. This thesis, which consists of an introductory chapter, three interrelated studies, and a concluding chapter, presents data on an under-studied cohort of chrysotile miners/millers from Baie Verte, Newfoundland and Labrador (NL), Canada. The first study will describe the development of a job exposure matrix (JEM) that was used to perform a retrospective exposure assessment for former workers of the mine/mill. The second study is an epidemiological assessment of a sub-group of the overall cohort of former employees who voluntarily joined the Baie Verte Miners Registry, an exposure/disease registry that was established to aid in the compensation process for ...