Hiding a pandemic: Dr G.W.H. Schepers and the politics of silicosis in South Africa

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Periodical article

Title:	Hiding a pandemic: Dr G.W.H. Schepers and the politics of silicosis in South Africa
Author:	MacCulloch, Jock
Year:	2009
Periodical:	Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume:	35
Issue:	4
Pages:	835-848
Language:	English
Geographic term:	South Africa
Subjects:	gold mining occupational health respiratory diseases
About person:	G.W.H. Schepers (1914-2011)
External link:	https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057070903313202
Abstract:	The gold miners of South Africa have been among the most heavily medicalized of any workforce. As a consequence, for much of the twentieth century, the Chamber of Mines and its members claimed that the mines were safe and miners were relatively free of dust-induced occupational disease. For decades that orthodoxy was repeated in the medical literature. It was also repeated by numerous Commissions of Enquiry. However, epidemiology published since 1990 has identified a pandemic of silicosis, which now threatens the industry. The reasons for the hitherto invisibility of that disease burden have less to do with the limits of medicine than with the political and commercial imperatives of the gold industry. Exemplary is the crisis in the compensation system that occurred between 1946 and 1956 and the role of the Pulmonary Disability Committee under the directorship of Dr G.W.H. Schepers, an outspoken critic of the compensation system, which favoured the mining companies rather than the miners. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]