As per a letter written on behalf of Dr Philip J. Landrigan, President of the Collegium Ramazzini, the Collegium has announced the award instituted in the memory of Dr Irving Selikoff in the field of scientific discovery and public health. Dr Selikoff, a U.S. based scientist was one of the foremost authorities on environmental medicine.

Collegium Ramazzini based in Carpi, Italy describes itself as "...a bridge between the world of scientific discovery and the social and political centres which must act on these discoveries..." to conserve life.

On the occasion of Global Asbestos Congress (November 2004) in Tokyo, this award will be bestowed on Dr Tushar Kant Joshi, director, Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health and a founding member of the Ban Asbestos Network of India (BANI). The Collegium has recognised his commitment in bringing into public domain the risks to health from asbestos.

A Fellow of the Collegium, Dr Joshi is a distinguished scientist who has studied the epidemiology of asbestos-related diseases in India. The Collegium Ramazzini called in 1999 for a ban on all uses of asbestos worldwide in an article published in numerous scientific journals. Because country-by-country actions have shifted rather than eliminated the health risks of asbestos, the Collegium realized that the only way to end the asbestos cancer epidemic is to ban all asbestos mining and manufacture in all nations. This approach is especially necessary to protect workers in developing countries such as India, which is the ninth leading producer of asbestos in the world, and the sixth largest user.

A number of studies project the number of premature deaths that will result ultimately from the ongoing asbestos cancer epidemic. The ILO has taken the incidence of asbestos-related cancer in
Finland and extrapolated it to the world worker population, to produce an estimate that at least 100,000 and maybe as many as 140,000 workers die each year from asbestos exposures
resulting in cancer.

When estimates from this and other studies are extrapolated to include the world population, it has been projected that the asbestos cancer epidemic will cause 5–10 million deaths, past and present.

This conservative estimate is based on the optimistic assumption that asbestos exposures will cease and that the epidemic will run itself out. In fact, however, world production of asbestos, which decreased by half in the 1990s, seems now to have stabilized. At present, more than 2 million tons of asbestos, primarily chrysotile, are mined and shipped around the world each year.

The largest asbestos producers are Russia, China, Canada, Kazakhstan, Brazil, and Zimbabwe.

Canada dominates world trade with an annual export of about 300,000 tons of chrysotile asbestos. The success of Canadian efforts to portray chrysotile as a ‘‘safer’’ asbestos are readily apparent in Asia. Over 70% of the world production is used in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, in countries desperate for industry and naıve to the health effects of occupational and environmental exposures to asbestos. India, China, Japan, Thailand, Russia, and Brazil each consumed more than 60,000 tons of asbestos in 2000. These six countries accounted for more than 80% of the world’s consumption of asbestos. This battle against asbestos is in danger of being lost precisely in the regions where the human costs may be greatest.

Relentless efforts are being employed in the intensive campaign to establish and maintain the asbestos industry in these countries. There are 13 large-scale and 673 small scale asbestos operations in India. It is estimated that some 6,000 workers are directly exposed to asbestos on a full-time basis, and another 100,000 workers are employed by the industry. It is not known how many millions of Indian citizens are exposed to asbestos building materials.

The science of occupational medicine emerged during the Seventeenth Century in Italy with the work of Bernardino Ramazzini. The Collegium is named after him. In 1682, Dr Ramazzini was given the Chair of Medicine in the University of Modena. In 1700, Dr. Ramazzini published the first edition of his most famous book, the De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (Diseases of Workers), the first comprehensive work on occupational diseases, outlining the health hazards of irritating chemicals, dust, metals, and other abrasive agents encountered by workers in 52 occupations.

Three hundred years later, in 1982, an international community of scholars formed an organization in his honour in order to advance the study of occupational and environmental health issues around the world. Dr. Selikoff founded it with a goal to work towards possible solutions to occupational and environmental health problems. Dr. Selikoff’s research was a turning point in the way the world looks at asbestos because it indisputably established its cancer causing nature.

The Collegium is governed by a Council limited to 180 elected Fellows, including leading scientists and other people distinguished by their concern for occupational and environmental health. The Collegium has reached out to persons of integrity in every continent and its membership is representative of over 30 countries. It is a non-profit organization and is not associated with or supported by any single government body or interest group.

While all the members of Ban Asbestos Network are convinced that the campaign to make India asbestos free has a long way to go before it succeeds in breaking the frozen passivity of the Indian Government so that it feels compelled to impose immediate ban on the import of asbestos and promotes its safer alternatives nonetheless BANI appreciates Dr Joshi’s courage of conviction and congratulates him on his selection for the Dr. Irving J. Selikoff Award.