when regulation was needed or they simply missed the boat. The entire nation has paid for this tardy ineptitude.
Further, the climate of the risk world has changed. It would appear that the days have passed in which the mining and handling of hazardous chemicals and compounds presents serious uncertainty for regulators. Dealing with asbestos is a dangerous activity, and the certainty of health damages following asbestos exposure has been well known for a long time. However, this fact has been denied or debated for political and economic reasons:
Those unfamiliar with the history of asbestos may wonder why over 40 years have been spent in such intensive research on a mineral that already had a disastrous record by the 1960s. It is explicable only in terms of the actions of asbestos mining and manufacturing interests, which in the mid 1960s set out to prove that chrysotile did not cause mesothelioma, thereby turning this cancer into a problem of fibre type. (Tweedale & McCulloch 2004, pp. 257–258).
Although asbestos has certainly not left public consciousness or entirely disappeared from the HSE and HSC agenda, there is little doubt that attention is now focusing on areas in which there is high uncertainty about the probability of a risky event taking place. As the HSE itself explains:
It is also worth noting that though more information frequently leads to a decrease in uncertainty, it does not necessarily change the probability of an event. For example, though frequent inspections of a critical component may reduce the uncertainty regarding the probability of the component failing within a period of time, the inspections do not reduce the probability of the component failing unless action is taken to remedy the situation (Health and Safety Executive 2001, p. 56).
Consequently, the regulatory environment in the UK appears to be concentrating on developing an understanding of the large and complex systems that can poten- tially account for new risks, such as biohazards and infectious diseases. Given the speed at which these risks can spread as biological agents, and the opaque network of actors involved with, for example, the agriculture and farming industries, new approaches to the strategic management and communication of risk must be developed in Britain.
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101
Introduction
Asbestos is probably one of the most feared contaminants on earth, and in practice it is the most expensive pollutant to regulate and remove. Between 1965 and 1995, 35,000 people have died in France from asbestos-related illnesses, and another 50,000 to 100,000 deaths are expected before 2025. The cost to indemnify these claims is estimated to be between 26.8 and 37.2 billion Euros over the next 20 years. Few commercial commodities have generated such intense scientific, legal, and political scrutiny as asbestos (Hncharek 1993). Yet, as a component of many industrial and construction materials, asbestos offers numerous advantages.
A question remains as to why the French government decided to ban asbestos around 1996.1 This choice reflects not only changes in the power equilibrium, public mobilization, media coverage of the crisis, epidemic outbreaks, and the emergence of scientific evidence; it also reflects a change in decision rationality. Although all the ele- ments of the above factors are important, they do not adequately explain why and how the public authorities, who had been aware of the potential dangers of asbestos since 1945,2 changed their mind on several key points and proceeded with the asbestos ban.
B. Reber
Research Center in Meaning, Ethics, Society, National Center for Scientific Research, University of Paris V (The Paris Descartes University), France
H. Sato ()
Department of Public Health, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
e-mails: [email protected]; [email protected]