Abstract
Since the end of the twentieth century, asbestos disasters as “complex-stock disasters” have evolved into a serious social problem in many advanced industrialized nations. In Japan, prompted into action by the Kubota Shock in 2005, the government enacted the Act on Asbestos Health Damage Relief in 2006, thus creating a new safety net to provide coverage for victims of environmental asbestos exposure and other asbestos victims not covered by the nation’s workers accident compensation insurance framework. However, no comprehensive study on asbestos disasters has yet been conducted to demand a synthesis of knowledge from the social and natural sciences. In the view of social science, it is essential to understand asbestos disasters by combining multiple economic approaches. Specifically, occupational disasters and environmental pollution need to be analyzed independently of one another and then identified as a series of connected events. To that end, there seems no choice but to establish an entirely new field of political economy that can aid our understanding and eventual solution of asbestos problems as an unprecedented complex-stock disaster.
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Notes
- 1.
Notes
1.The outbreak of asbestos-related health problems among Libby mine workers and their family members was attributed to the asbestos found in the vermiculite ore that was being mined but in general it may be considered an example of an asbestos disaster (Mori 2008).
- 2.
As a specific example, Dorman cites the corporate withholding of information on causal relationships between asbestos and lung cancer that medical researchers had discovered in the 1930s. That information became widely known by the 1970s, but in the interim enormous numbers of workers were exposed to the risk of contracting asbestos-related illnesses due to corporate decisions not to disclose such information (Dorman 1996:43).
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Mori, H. (2011). A Political Economy of Asbestos Disasters. In: Miyamoto, K., Morinaga, K., Mori, H. (eds) Asbestos Disaster. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-53915-5_1
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