47
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Tackling injustices of occupational lung disease acquired in South African mines: recent developments and ongoing challenges

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Background

          South Africa’s mineral resources have produced, and continue to produce, enormous economic wealth; yet decades of colonialism, apartheid, capital flight, and challenges in the neoliberal post-apartheid era have resulted in high rates of occupational lung disease and low rates of compensation for ex-miners and their families. Given growing advocacy and activism of current and former mine workers, initiatives were launched by the South African government in 2012 to begin to address the legacy of injustice. This study aimed to assess developments over the last 5 years in providing compensation, quantify shortfalls and explore underlying challenges.

          Methods

          Using the database with compensable disease claims from over 200,000 miners, the medical assessment database of 400,000 health records and the employment database with 1.6 million miners, we calculated rates of claims, unpaid claims and shortfall in claim filing for each of the southern African countries with at least 25,000 miners who worked in South African mines, by disease type and gender. We also conducted interviews in Johannesburg, Eastern Cape, Lesotho and a local service unit near a mine site, supplemented by document review and auto-reflection, adopting the lens of a critical rights-based approach.

          Results

          By the end of 2017, 111,166 miners had received compensation (of which 55,864 were for permanent lung impairment, and another 52,473 for tuberculosis), however 107,714 compensable claims remained unpaid. Many (28.4%) compensable claims are from Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana and elsewhere in southern Africa, a large proportion of which have been longstanding. A myriad of diverse systemic barriers persist, especially for workers and their families outside South Africa. Calculating predicted burden of occupational lung disease compared to compensable claims paid suggests a major shortfall in filing claims in addition to the large burden of still unpaid claims.

          Conclusion

          Despite progress made, our analysis reveals ongoing complex barriers and illustrates that the considerable underfunding of the systems required for sustained prevention and social protection (including compensation) needs urgent attention. With class action suits in the process of settlement, the globalized mining sector is now beginning to be held accountable. A critical rights-based approach underlines the importance of ongoing concerted action by all.

          Related collections

          Most cited references26

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          A trial of mass isoniazid preventive therapy for tuberculosis control.

          Tuberculosis is epidemic among workers in South African gold mines. We evaluated an intervention to interrupt tuberculosis transmission by means of mass screening that was linked to treatment for active disease or latent infection.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Occupational health hazards in mining: an overview.

            This review article outlines the physical, chemical, biological, ergonomic and psychosocial occupational health hazards of mining and associated metallurgical processes. Mining remains an important industrial sector in many parts of the world and although substantial progress has been made in the control of occupational health hazards, there remains room for further risk reduction. This applies particularly to traumatic injury hazards, ergonomic hazards and noise. Vigilance is also required to ensure exposures to coal dust and crystalline silica remain effectively controlled.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Oscillating migration and the epidemics of silicosis, tuberculosis, and HIV infection in South African gold miners.

              Hundreds of thousands of men from rural areas of South Africa and neighboring countries have come to seek work in the gold mines. They are not immigrants in the usual sense as they work for periods in the mines, go home, and then return. This is termed oscillating or circular migration. Today we have serious interrelated epidemics of silicosis, tuberculosis, and HIV infection in the gold mining industry. This article discusses the role of oscillating migration in fuelling these epidemics, by examining the historical, political, social, and economic contexts of these diseases. The impact of silicosis, tuberculosis, and HIV infection extends beyond individual miners to their families and communities. Failure to control dust and tuberculosis has resulted in serious consequences decades later. The economic and political migrant labor system provided the foundations for the epidemics seen in southern Africa today. (c) 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                kistnb@health.gov.za
                annalee.yassi@ubc.ca
                jessica_yu@alumni.ubc.ca
                sam.spiegel@ed.ac.uk
                andre@ipcapital.co.za
                Stephen.barker@ubc.ca
                jerry.spiegel@ubc.ca
                Journal
                Global Health
                Global Health
                Globalization and Health
                BioMed Central (London )
                1744-8603
                28 June 2018
                28 June 2018
                2018
                : 14
                : 60
                Affiliations
                [1 ]GRID grid.437959.5, Department of Health, ; Johannesburg, South Africa
                [2 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2288 9830, GRID grid.17091.3e, School of Population and Public Health (SPPH), , University of British Columbia (UBC), ; 430-2206 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3 Canada
                [3 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 7988, GRID grid.4305.2, Centre of African Studies, , University of Edinburgh, ; Edinburgh, UK
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4699-3082
                Article
                376
                10.1186/s12992-018-0376-3
                6022447
                29954399
                4160d965-7229-4465-8fbb-6a958a734892
                © The Author(s). 2018

                Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

                History
                : 6 April 2018
                : 25 May 2018
                Funding
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000024, Canadian Institutes of Health Research;
                Award ID: PCS-146397
                Award ID: FRN 115212
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Research
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2018

                Health & Social care
                mining,south africa,workers’ compensation,tuberculosis,occupational lung disease,social justice,social protection,southern africa,migrant workers,underfunding

                Comments

                Comment on this article