"À faire un peu de Poussière": Environmental health and the asbestos strike of 1949

In Mid-February 1949, Workers at the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, Québec, voted to strike against the American-owned Johns-Manville Company. This work stoppage precipitated a provincial industry-wide strike that lasted for almost five months. The 1949 Asbestos strike has been incorporated into Québec's broader political historiography, and is generally regarded as a critical turning point in the history of labour and social relations in French- speaking Canada. Yet the environmental health aspects of the conflict in Asbestos remain largely unexamined. Showing how environmental health issues were a trigger for the strike and a sustained goal of the Asbestos workers seeking improvements in their conditions of work, this article demonstrates how central dust and disease were in the negotiations and arbitration hearings involving unionized workers and the company, both in 1949 and in the years that followed. It also accents the extent to which these environmental issues became health concerns that spread throughout the community. In looking at the Asbestos strike of 1949 through the lens of environmental concerns, fresh insight is gained about the nature of one of Canada's major labour conflicts, expanding our understanding of how health issues emerging in the workplace but extending well past it can affect the nature of everyday life and well being in a resource community

La mine qui commence à grignoter le village1 : Expansion minière territoriale à Asbestos

The town of Asbestos is home to what was once the largest opencast asbestos mine in the world, the Jeffrey Mine. Most of the town's history has been dominated by the resource industry that gave it its name and by the American Johns-Manville Company, which owned the mine and carried out an aggressive style of land management. When it expanded the edges of the mine into the community in order to meet rising global demand for asbestos, the company brought radical changes to the local environment and landscape. As the global asbestos industry began to collapse, Johns-Manville stepped up its expansion plans, much to the detriment of a local community that, however, did not remain voiceless in this process. This paper examines how the community negotiated a balance between progress and place at the epicentre of this mining industry

International agency over local land: Mine expansion and industrial priorities in the Town of Asbestos, Canada

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.From the late 19th to the late 20th century, the cities and industries of the world became increasingly reliant on fireproof materials made from asbestos. In focusing on the town of Asbestos, Canada, this paper will show how this process of market boom and bust shaped a fierce local culture rooted in working and living on a rapidly changing environment. By analyzing the successive expansions of the giant mine located in the centre of Asbestos, this paper will highlight how unique understandings of self and place develop in mining communities and form a complex culture rooted in a constantly changing environment

Asbestos, Quebec: The Town, the Mineral, and the Local-Global Balance Between the Two

From the late 19th to the late 20th century, the cities and industries of the world became increasingly reliant on fireproof materials made from asbestos. As asbestos was used more and more in building materials and household appliances, its harmful effect on human health, such as asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, became apparent. The dangers surrounding the mineral led to the collapse of the industry in the 1980s. While the market demand and medical rejection of asbestos were international, they were also experienced in the mining and processing communities at the core of the global industry. In the town of Asbestos, Quebec, home of the largest chrysotile asbestos mine in the world, we can see how this process of market boom and bust shaped a fierce local cultural identity. This dissertation examines the global asbestos industry from a local perspective, showing how the people of Asbestos, Quebec had international reach through the work they did and the industry they continue to support today. This thesis explores how the boundaries between humans and the environment were blurred in Asbestos as a strong cultural identity was created through the interaction between people and the natural world. This work advances our understanding of the interdependence of the local-global relationship between resource industries and international trade networks, illustrating the ways it shapes communities and how communities shape it. Bringing bodies of land, human bodies, and the body politic of Asbestos, Quebec into the history of the global asbestos trade helps demonstrate how this local cultural identity grew to influence national policy and global debates on commodity flows, occupational health, and environmental justice

The Role of ATP-Binding Cassette Transporters in Neuro-Inflammation: Relevance for Bioactive Lipids

ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters are highly expressed by brain endothelial cells that form the blood-brain barrier (BBB). These efflux pumps play an important role in maintaining brain homeostasis as they actively hinder the entry of unwanted blood-derived compounds into the central nervous system (CNS). Consequently, their high activity at the BBB has been a major hurdle for the treatment of several brain diseases, as they prevent numerous drugs to reach their site of action within the brain. Importantly, recent data indicate that endogenous substrates for ABC transporters may include inflammatory mediators, such as prostaglandins, leukotrienes, cytokines, chemokines and bioactive lipids, suggesting a potential role for ABC transporters in immunological responses, and more specifically in inflammatory brain disorders, such as multiple sclerosis (MS). In this review, we will give a comprehensive overview of recent findings that illustrate this novel role for ABC transporters in neuro-inflammatory processes. Moreover, we will provide first insights into underlying mechanisms and focus on the importance for bioactive lipids, in particular platelet-activating factor (PAF), herein. A thorough understanding of these events may form the basis for the development for selective treatment modalities to dampen the neuro-inflammatory attack in MS and thereby reducing tissue damage

Out of the darkness: A History of Huntington's Disease in Australia

Huntington’s disease (HD) is a genetic neurological condition which has a profound influence on the families it affects. The symptoms of the disease are challenging – in addition, social forces strongly influence the way the disease is experienced. It has been a deeply stigmatised condition, and its presence was often kept secret. In this dissertation, I have explored both social and medical aspects of the history of HD, primarily in Australia, building on the work of two scholars, Peter Harper (UK) and Alice Wexler (US). By tracing the histories of HD families, I discovered that HD has been part of the fabric of life in Australia since the convict era, and that some families with the disease were well-respected in their communities, in contrast to narratives which have presented the stigma as inevitable. Wexler has previously shown that in the US, the degree of stigma faced by HD families has varied over time, and my research found this to be also true of the disease in Australia. The earliest descriptions of the disease in the US were mostly made by physicians familiar with HD families. My research revealed a similar story - two physicians who published on HD both grew up in an area of Tasmania with relatively high rates of the disease. The impact of eugenic thinking in the stigmatization of HD in the US, Germany and the UK was noted more than 20 years ago, though its impact in other countries has remained unexplored. Eugenics as a formal movement was not successful in Australia, however eugenic ideas formed part of the social discourse. I show through medical journal articles, items in the popular press and educational organisations how those with hereditary diseases were labeled as “unfit”, promoting stigma which contributed to it being hidden. Finally I describe how the disease began to emerge from “the closet” in the early 1970s, with families and researchers forging a new collaboration to search for treatments, support families and reduce stigma

Sanov and central limit theorems for output statistics of quantum Markov chains

In this paper, we consider the statistics of repeated measurements on the output of a quantum Markov chain. We establish a large deviations result analogous to Sanov’s theorem for the multi-site empirical measure associated to finite sequences of consecutive outcomes of a classical stochastic process. Our result relies on the construction of an extended quantum transition operator (which keeps track of previous outcomes) in terms of which we compute moment generating functions, and whose spectral radius is related to the large deviations rate function. As a corollary to this, we obtain a central limit theorem for the empirical measure. Such higher level statistics may be used to uncover critical behaviour such as dynamical phase transitions, which are not captured by lower level statistics such as the sample mean. As a step in this direction, we give an example of a finite system whose level-1 (empirical mean) rate function is independent of a model parameter while the level-2 (empirical measure) rate is not

Coalition unionism : exploring how and when coalitions contribute to union renewal in Sydney, Toronto and Chicago

Item does not contain fulltextWe have previously identified eight novel autoantibody targets in the cerebrospinal fluid of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, including sperm-associated Ag 16 (SPAG16). In the current study, we further investigated the autoantibody response against SPAG16-a protein with unknown function in the CNS-and its expression in MS pathology. Using isoelectric focusing, we detected SPAG16-specific oligoclonal bands in the cerebrospinal fluid of 5 of 23 MS patients (22%). Analysis of the anti-SPAG16 Ab reactivity in the plasma of a total of 531 donors using ELISA demonstrated significantly elevated anti-SPAG16 Ab levels (p = 0.002) in 32 of 153 MS patients (21%) compared with all other control groups with 95% specificity for the disease. To investigate the pathologic relevance of anti-SPAG16 Abs in vivo, anti-SPAG16 Abs were injected in mice with experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, resulting in a significant disease exacerbation. Finally, we demonstrated a consistent upregulation of SPAG16 in MS brain and experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis spinal cord lesions, more specifically in reactive astrocytes. We conclude that SPAG16 is a novel autoantibody target in a subgroup of MS patients and in combination with other diagnostic criteria, elevated levels of anti-SPAG16 Abs could be used as a biomarker for diagnosis. Furthermore, the pathologic relevance of anti-SPAG16 Abs was shown in vivo