Mining is bad for health: a voyage of discovery

Abstract

Mining continues to be a dangerous activity, whether large-scale industrial mining or small-scale artisanal mining. Not only are there accidents, but exposure to dust and toxins, along with stress from the working environment or managerial pressures, give rise to a range of diseases that affect miners. I look at mining and health from various personal perspectives: that of the ordinary man (much of life depends on mined elements in the house, car and phone); as a member of the Society for Environmental Geochemistry and Health (environmental contamination and degradation leads to ill health in nearby communities); as a public health doctor (mining health is affected by many factors, usually acting in a mix, ranging from individual inheritance-genetic makeup, sex, age; personal choices-diet, lifestyle; living conditions-employment, war; social support-family, local community; environmental conditions-education, work; to national and international constraints-trade, economy, natural world); as a volunteer (mining health costs are not restricted to miners or industry but borne by everyone who partakes of mining benefits-all of us); and as a lay preacher (the current global economy concentrates on profit at the expense of the health of miners). Partnership working by academics with communities, government and industry should develop evidence-based solutions. Employment, health, economic stability and environmental protection need not be mutually exclusive. We all need to act.

Keywords: Determinants of disease; Economics; Pneumoconiosis; Prevention; Psychological stress; Social support.

Fig. 1

Mining-related determinants of disease, associated diseases and dimension (scale) of the disease burden [from Entwistle et al. (2019). Used freely under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/); the ‘disease pyramid’© is after Stewart and Hursthouse (2018)]