and that the safety of the alternatives to asbestos was uncertain so they should not be substituted until more research had been carried out.
The implication is that the EU should abandon its work on a ban on the importation and new use of chrysotile (white asbestos), and oppose the introduction of bans by individual countries.
Who are the expert committee?
The expert committee was set up by DG XXIV after the European Parliament censured the Commission for its role in the BSE crisis. Henceforth, matters about safety should be determined on the basis of expert opinion.
This Committee is made up of one expert from each Member State, and from a cursory glance at their credentials, several appear to be food scientists with no relevant experience of occupational health .
What else have they done?
Apparently, at the same meeting as they discussed white asbestos, they also discussed products containing phthalic anhydrides (such as children's toys - like Barbie) and decided that they were dangerous and needed to be restricted.
It is unknown how many people have died as a result of playing with Barbie dolls, but the TUC believes it is considerably lower than the three thousand, eight hundred who died after working with asbestos in the Great Britain last year.
What is wrong with their decision?
Firstly, it is inconsistent. If there is no known safe threshold for white asbestos, then there is no safe control level. Scientists have consistently underestimated the risks being run by people working with asbestos, and the result of these underestimates has been continuing deaths.
Second, it presumes that the current legal levels of control are being obeyed, or indeed can be enforced. In practice, no Member State's inspectorate could possibly enforce the current control levels in every workplace where asbestos is disturbed or being worked on. And trade unions regularly come across examples of wholesale breaches of the current control levels. The current laws cannot be enforced which is why we have called for a ban on importation and new use, because that can be enforced.
Thirdly, the committee's attitude, "better the devil you know" may be common sense, but it is not good health and safety. Leaving people exposed to a known killer because we don't know how dangerous the substitutes are would expose thousands of workers to the possibility of a painful death "just in case". If the alternatives are found to be just as dangerous as asbestos, they should be banned too - and in reality, the best solution is usually to do something completely different: asbestos has too often been the wrong solution to a non-existent problem.
Fourth, this experience underpins how naive it is to allow scientists to control public health policy. They have demonstrated that, whether they are competent scientifically or not, they do not understand health and safety well enough to decide on control measures in practice - that should be left to the representatives of the public (politicians), workers and business.
What can be done now?
We need to decide how to deal with the report because, left as it is, the European Commission has no option but to follow the advice of its Scientific Committee.
One option would be to challenge the Committee to reconsider the evidence in the light of the practical realities outlined above.
Another would be to seek a change to the composition of the Committee so that it more accurately reflects the state of knowledge of occupational health, occupational hygiene and health and safety generally, and would therefore have a better chance of analysing the extremely contentious issue of white asbestos.
A third might be to re-route the campaign for a ban through the European Parliament where there is likely to be more sympathy for the case, and where "pure" science is less relevant.
We need a solution, and we need it quickly!
