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 Home News General
End of Financial Year Appeal - Mekong-Australia Asbestos Disease Project23 May 2011This June we are asking for your help to continue our ground-breaking asbestos disease prevention project in the Mekong delta region of South East Asia.
Our project - known as the Mekong-Australia Asbestos Disease Project - addresses this public health time-bomb that has been virtually ignored by most national governments and the international development community. The project aims to bring about change by educating and empowering workers around the issue of asbestos, lobbying government, and identifying protective solutions and asbestos alternatives. Your help is urgently required as, despite an extremely successful AusAID supported pilot program in Vietnam, further funding has not been forthcoming from the Australian Government. It is vital that this important work continues until long-term funding can be secured. Your generous donation to this appeal will help us expand our asbestos education programs and strengthen understanding of the dangers of asbestos in South East Asia. In Australia, one of the most tragic aspects of the asbestos story is that for many decades unsuspecting workers in the mining, manufacturing and construction industries were exposed to risk on a daily basis. Without the educative and awareness-raising work of programs like the Mekong-Australia Asbestos Disease Project generations of workers in Vietnam, Cambodia and Lao PDR may suffer a similar tragedy. Australians also understand that the asbestos products that have been used in our homes, schools and offices never become 'safe'. Without asbestos education and the identification of alternatives, such products will continue to be a health threat to this and future generations. This is an opportunity for us, as an Australian community fully aware of the dangers of asbestos, to help South East Asian communities protect themselves from asbestos-related disease. While the only way to fully protect these societies is to institute an absolute ban on the use of asbestos, the most appropriate role we can play right now is to support workers who are currently being exposed to asbestos, while raising community awareness of the dangers. Our pilot program in Vietnam showed some remarkable progress of which we can all be proud. In just a year, we developed one of Vietnam's first asbestos training programs for workers and union officials, engaged with workers about their health and asbestos risks, and helped establish Vietnam's first focal point for asbestos issues - the National Resource Centre for Asbestos and Asbestos Related Disease. We also completed studies on asbestos alternatives and built research alliances that could help propel Vietnam to a post-asbestos future. Without long-term AusAID funding, a scaled-back program is currently being supported by the AMWU.
Your support is needed now - in Australia it took decades of fighting from working men and women to achieve a total ban even once the dangers of asbestos were widely known.
It is crucial to protect and nurture this process of change on asbestos issues in Vietnam, Cambodia and Lao PDR. This is an opportunity we cannot let slip away.
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Today in many developing Asian countries, raw asbestos continues to be used and handled by unprotected and unsuspecting workers.
