Friday, November 21, 2003
New regulations issued by the Quebec Health Department today will require doctors who diagnose cases of a disease caused by asbestos to report it to public health authorities within 48 hours.
Studies published last week by the Institut de la santé publique du Québec recommended that mesothelioma, a rare cancer of the lung lining caused by breathing in asbestos fibres, other lung cancers caused by asbestos and asbestosis, a life-shortening disease that makes breathing difficult, be declared reportable diseases.
"We are happy," said Irène Langis, spokesperson for the Institut. "We knew it was coming."
The Health Department took the steps to monitor diseases caused by asbestos before it received the studies. This is the first major revision of Quebec's list of notifiable diseases since 1992, said Health Department official Hélène Gingras.
Langis explained the listing of asbestos-caused diseases is important because it allows public-health officials to act.
"We can better evaluate how many cases there are," she said. "We can document the diseases better."
And public health officials can use that knowledge to eliminate causes of asbestos-related disease, Langis added.
The studies warned even Quebec-produced white chrysotile asbestos can cause mesothelioma and other cancers.
Exposure to asbestos is responsible for about one-third, or 60 out of 180 work-related deaths a year, reported to Quebec's Commission de la santé et de la sécurité au travail, the workplace health and safety commission.
The studies found cases reported to the CSST were only 22 per cent of total mesothelioma cases reported in Quebec and 0.3 per cent of lung cancer cases registered with Quebec's centre registry of tumours.
The new regulation would allow a clearer picture to emerge of asbestos illnesses. Asbestos is a fibrous mineral that is produced in Quebec, but which the 15-country European Union will ban by 2005.
Also added to Quebec's list of reportable diseases, which includes such infectious diseases as cholera, botulism and AIDS, were SARS - severe acute respiratory syndrome - West Nile virus, listeria and similar diseases, infections that cannot be treated with antibiotics, diseases the general population is vaccinated against and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, the human variant of mad-cow disease.
The full list is published in the Nov. 5 edition of the Gazette officielle du Québec.
kdougherty@thegazette.canwest.com
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