Booker’s co-author springs to his defence – with more misinformation on asbestos

Following George Monbiot’s damning exposé of Sunday Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker’s bogus claims about asbestos and global warming, Booker’s co-author Richard North has written a response on his “EU Referendum” blog – condemning Monbiot for what he calls “the devil’s techniques”.

North defends Booker’s use of a research paper from 2000 by two Health and Safety Executive (HSE) statisticians, Hodgson and Darnton to support his longstanding claim that white (chrysotile) asbestos poses no significant risk to human health.

According to North:

What the authors do write, in respect of the use of asbestos cement, is that the risk is so low as to be “probably insignificant”. The paper then assesses the risk of acquiring lung cancer from “cumulative exposure”, suggesting that “the case for a threshold – i.e., zero, or at least very low risk – is arguable.”

Booker, therefore, has paraphrased the quotes, conveying their general import, his mistake being to put own words in quotes. But is he wrong? Not at all. The sense of what Hodgson and Darton are writing is accurately conveyed.

North’s account of Hodgson and Darnton’s conclusions constrasts sharply with that of the HSE, who reported back in 2002 that:

Their paper stated that whilst the risks from chrysotile were significantly less than those from amosite or crocidolite, they were not negligible. Furthermore, they acknowledged the considerable degree of uncertainty in the quantification of these risks. This uncertainty would make any uncoupling of chysotile from asbestos legislation highly unwise.

North creates the impression that Hodgson and Darnton made a specific judgement about the risks posed by “asbestos cement” (as opposed to other asbestos products). But the paper appears to do nothing of the kind. According to Trevor Ogden, the editor of the journal in which the paper was published, who recently commented on the issue in a discussion on the New Statesman website:

The paper does not say that the risks from asbestos cement are probably insignificant – it uses this phrase for the chrysotile risks at the lowest exposures. At higher (but still low) exposures, the authors gave estimates of lung cancer risk about 30-40 times lower than those from crocidolite, and did not regard this as insignificant…

In seeking to defend Booker’s bogus claims, North has seized on Hodgson and Darnton’s statement of the risks from chrysotile at the lowest exposures, and sought to portray this as a general conclusion about the risk from “white asbestos cement” at any exposure.

George Monbiot endorses “Don’t Get Fooled Again”

I’m delighted that “Don’t Get Fooled Again” has been given a generous endorsement by the Guardian columnist and campaigner George Monbiot: “This is an exceptional book: rigorous, witty and beautifully-written. If you want to know how the world works, you must read it.”

“Don’t Get Fooled Again” reviewed in the Hindustan Times

From Kushalrani Gulab in the Hindustan Times

Looking at “the myriad ways we can deceive ourselves — and be deceived by others,” the book begins by telling us briefly that we’re usually predisposed to having an idealised view of ourselves and everything that makes up our identities, and then gets into some seriously scary stuff. Stuff like how so many of us delude ourselves into taking people in authority — whether government types, politicians, business people, scientists and ‘experts’ or the media — so seriously that we don’t bother to cross-check, investigate or question what they (or frankly, even what we ourselves) say or do.

Now that we’re dealing with some hardcore terrorism and communalism problems in India, I was particularly gripped by the chapter titled ‘Heroes and Villains’. This uses the example of the US treatment of captured Iraqis in Abu Ghraib to show how easy it is for people to be so single-minded in their zeal to ‘punish evil’ that all rules of humanity go flying. While there’s nothing I’d like better than to have terrorists and communalists caught, tried and punished — and I have to say, the crackdowns do seem justified — I’ve been troubled by the raids on Muslim localities, the controversial Nanavati Report and the fact that, despite assurances from the Centre and the state governments, not much seems to have been accomplished in tracking down the people responsible for the recent violence against Christians, even though the Bajrang Dal has been indicted.

Don’t Get Fooled Again can be ordered with free delivery worldwide from the Book Depository.

Campaigners warn of “asbestos timebomb” in India

From the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat.

Report warns India is “on the cusp of a devastating asbestos cancer epidemic”

Record and rising asbestos imports to India will translate to thousands of asbestos-related cancer deaths each year and are already responsible for “a hidden epidemic,” an expert report has revealed. Exposing the Indian Government’s collusion with asbestos stakeholders at home and abroad, the authors call for an immediate national ban on all asbestos use.

“India’s Asbestos Time Bomb,” published today (September 25, 2008) by a coalition of Asian campaign and research organisations, global union federations and the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat (IBAS), calculates that total asbestos usage in India since 1980 exceeds 6 million tonnes, matching the amount used in the UK in its entire industrial history. India is far and away the world’s largest importer of asbestos.

“The UK is now in the grip of its largest ever industrial disease epidemic, with between 5,000 and 10,000 estimated to be dying of asbestos cancers every year,” says report editor Laurie Kazan-Allen. “India, with ineffective regulation on asbestos use, is on the verge of a much larger and more devastating epidemic. Because it can take 30 years or more for asbestos-related cancers to emerge, India faces an inevitable and sharp escalation in cancer cases over the next three decades. No one is safe!”

Annual imports of asbestos to India now exceed a quarter of a million tonnes, and have climbed rapidly over the last decade. “We estimate asbestos cancers already claim thousands of lives each year in India, but this will certainly exceed 10,000 cases a year by 2040,” says Kazan-Allen. “This will put an incredible strain on families, communities and India’s medical system.

A hidden epidemic exists due to medical ignorance and government intransigence; in light of the dearth of serious measures to alert workers and consumers of the asbestos hazard, things can only get worse. India does not have a national cancer registry or any system to record asbestos cancers or asbestos exposures, so the problem remains unrecognised and unaddressed. But instead of acting to remedy these failings, the report warns that India is actively encouraging asbestos use, both at home and globally.

India, working closely with asbestos stakeholders in Canada, has been instrumental in blocking a United Nations move to impose health information disclosures on exports of chrysotile asbestos. When the UN next considers applying global right-to-know rules on chrysotile at its Rotterdam Convention meeting in Rome this October, it is likely that both nations will again move to veto any effort to require exporters to warn of the risks posed by using chrysotile asbestos.

“There is an unimaginable and unconscionable level of ignorance of the asbestos hazard in India, a situation that is a great boon to Indian asbestos companies that are benefiting from huge levels of economic growth,” says IBAS’s Laurie Kazan-Allen. “The government is a willing conspirator in this state of affairs, with devastating consequences for the health of its citizens. But politicians and asbestos peddlers should take heed – we aim to see the industry wither and die and its apologists face the courts for knowingly and in the name of profit pushing the world’s worst ever industrial killer.”