Who's really abusing paid sick days?

Ontario's Bill 148 includes 10 Personal Emergency Leave (PEL) days, the first two of which are paid, and an end to sick notes for minor illnesses. But Ontario Premier Doug Ford considers these minor reforms "disastrous." With his government's proposed Bill 47, Ford wants to bring back sick notes, eliminate the paid days, cut PEL days to eight and restrict them further -- allowing only three for personal illness, three for family duties and two for bereavement. So you better get out your calendar and carefully plan out your medical emergency, family deaths and other unexpected crises for the year.

Health providers, backed by clear medical evidence, had lobbied for seven paid sick days; Bill 148 provided two. But Ford wants to cut these to zero, based on demands from the big business lobby (like the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and the Retail Council of Canada), who claim workers are "abusing" their paid sick days. These claims are based on the common myth that providing paid sick days invites widespread abuse and, therefore, requires medical surveillance.

For example, an article in the Financial Post claimed, "abuse of sick leave policies in the workplace is rampant," driven by every "employee with a sniffle" who wants to get "paid for staying longer at the cottage." It suggested a modest proposal: that employees "will think twice about taking a day off if it costs them a day's pay, or even costs them their job." The article also invoked medical surveillance: "The best way to diminish unwarranted absenteeism is to require those who are not 'totally' disabled from performing any task to show up at work to perform whatever duties the report establishes they are capable of. If the medical reports are still not credible, have an independent examination done."

Unfortunately, this punitive approach to illness is already the norm for minimum wage workers.

Until this year, those at workplaces with fewer than 50 employees could have been fired for taking a single unpaid day off work to deal with a personal emergency. By extending job-protected personal emergency leave to all workplaces, nearly 2 million workers will have job security if their child care falls through, or they have a medical emergency. Millions more gained the legal right to paid sick days for the first time, as Ontario became the first jurisdiction in Canada to provide two paid emergency leave days (sick days) for all workers after only seven days on the job. Among those benefiting from the new provision are thousands of unionized workers who did not previously have the right to paid sick days in their collective agreement.

Unsurprisingly, the opposition to expand paid sick days in Ontario is encountering the same opposition as in other jurisdictions. But where paid sick days have been given a chance, the myths against them have melted, and the evidence has shown that the real abuse doesn't come from employees taking advantage of them but employers not granting them.

Ideology vs. evidence

More than a decade ago, San Francisco became the first jurisdiction in the U.S. to mandate paid sick days for all employees. The big business lobby claimed the sky would fall, but a survey of more than 700 employers and nearly 1,200 employees found otherwise. Despite having access to up to nine paid sick days every year, the average employee used only three -- and a quarter used zero. The most common reasons for using paid sick days were to visit a doctor or dentist, or care for a sick child or other family member -- exactly as the paid sick days were intended -- and this helped parents stay home with a sick child rather than sending them to school to expose others to infection.

Six out of seven employers did not report any effect on profitability, and two-thirds of employers were supportive. "I thought the sick day ordinance could become an excuse for my servers or other employees to call in sick at the last minute and leave shifts unstaffed," said one restaurant owner. "Turns out, that hasn't been a problem at all." This is because paid sick days encourage people to access health care and recover at home, promoting faster and healthier return to work, and greater retention and productivity. Where there was abuse, it was on the employer side: nearly a quarter of employees reported that their employers responded punitively to their illnesses, threatening wage loss or giving fewer hours or worse tasks -- and these abuses disproportionately affected women, people of colour and low-wage workers.

In 2014, New York City expanded paid sick days to 1.4 million employees. This was against the wishes of a small but powerful group: the mayor predicted "deleterious impacts on businesses," and the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce claimed it would add "additional financial burdens." But as a follow up study explained:

"When it was first proposed, critics of the paid sick time law argued that it would lead to a loss of jobs in the City and impose a major cost burden on employers, especially small businesses. They also predicted that such a law would invite widespread abuse by employees. However, as this report shows, these fears have proven unfounded. By their own account, the vast majority of employers were able to adjust quite easily to the new law, and for most, the cost impact was minimal to nonexistent. Indeed, a year and a half after the law took effect, 86 per cent of the employers we surveyed expressed support for the paid sick days law."

As a former chamber of commerce official explained, "I don't know anybody that has actually had to cut people because of this policy. I also thought there might be abuse. But in our case there was absolutely no abuse." This experience was shared by 98 per cent of employers who reported no known cases of abuse, while only 0.3 per cent reported more than three cases. Once again, where there was frequent abuse it was on the employer side:

"While 87 per cent of the employers we surveyed made paid sick days available to some or all of their workers, 13 per cent failed to do so -- a surprisingly high figure given the fact that all those surveyed are covered by the law and required to offer paid sick days. A year and a half after the law took effect, among the employers that provided paid sick days, only 58 per cent offered them to all employees, as the law requires, while 42 per cent provided paid sick days only to some categories of employees."

Making Ontario open for sickness

Doug Ford was elected on a promise to listen to health providers and end hallway medicine. This would mean supporting Bill 148 -- which starts to expand paid sick days, end sick notes, and supports broader social determinants of health by raising the minimum wage and providing equal pay, fair scheduling and easier unionization. But with Bill 47, Ford wants to do the opposite: ending paid sick days, bringing back sick notes, freezing the minimum wage and rolling back healthy labour law. This is not based on medical evidence, but rather big business ideology -- the same ideology that leads Ford to guess that Bill 148 has led to tens of thousands of job losses, when unemployment is actually down.

The evidence is clear that paid sick days increase preventive care while reducing emergency department visits, and protect public health by making it easier for people to recover at home rather than spreading germs in the workplace, and for parents to keep their sick kids at home rather than spreading germs in school. Paid sick days are a key component of public health and there is no evidence that employees abuse them. Where there is abuse, it is by employers not providing them as mandated by law and as required by public health.

As a fourth temp agenda worker has been killed at Fiera Foods, Ford wants to reduce workplace inspections that uncover real abuse, while bringing back the red tape of sick notes to police a problem that doesn't exist. Forcing people with minor illnesses into doctor's offices and emergency rooms just to get a sick note is not only unnecessary but a drain on public health care and a threat to public health.

As the former head of the Ontario Medical Association explained, "you don't want to encourage people who have infectious diseases to go to their doctor's office when it's not necessary. They're in a waiting room with other people, some of them have very serious illnesses like cancer. There are pregnant mothers and children. They're putting those people at risk…[these visits] are expensive, they're unnecessary and they put other people at risk. We don't have the resources in the health-care system to police absenteeism for employers." This was reiterated by the current head of the Ontario Medical Association, who explained that "with flu season upon us, prolonged wait times and hallway medicine, we need to find ways to keep doctor's offices free for patients sick enough to need it. We need to find ways to let people stay home to recover for minor illnesses."

This means expanding rather than ending paid sick days, and policing abusive workplaces rather than sick workers. This starts with defending Bill 148, and revoking Bill 47.

Follow @DecentWorkHlth and visit www.15andfairness.org to take action today.

Cholera: the latest war against Haitian democracy

A cholera outbreak in Haiti has killed more than 250 people killed, and infected more than 3300, in just over one week. Five of those infected were in the capital of Port-au-Prince, raising the specter of a mass epidemic. According to Imogen Wall, spokeswoman for the United Nations humanitarian office in Haiti, "It's tragedy upon tragedy for Haiti. We're working on a worst-case scenario. We're planning for a national outbreak."

     Worse than a tragedy, this is a crime. Cholera is terrifying but easily preventable and treatable. Spread through contaminated water it causes such severe diarrhea that it can kill through dehydration in a matter of hours. But it is treated with large volumes of simple fluids—either intravenous or oral rehydration—and can be prevented with clean water and proper sanitation. The science of cholera prevention has existed for 150 years, ever since Dr. John Snow famously plotted the deaths of a London outbreak on a map and found them to centre around a contaminated water pipe. When he persuaded the authorities to shut off the pump the number of cholera cases dropped.
     Rudolf Vircow, who studied epidemics at the time of Snow, concluded that “if disease is an expression of individual life under unfavourable circumstances, then epidemics must be indicative of mass disturbances”. The emergence of a cholera epidemic in Haiti, like the massive death toll following the January earthquake, exposes the mass disturbance imposed on Haiti by centuries of foreign intervention.

THE WAR AGAINST HAITIAN DEMOCRACY
     Two-hundred years ago Haitians carried out the only successful slave revolution. But France forced them to pay $21 billion for “lost property”, which it took over a century to pay. Throughout the 20th century the US has interfered in Haitian development, invading in 1915 and staying for 20 years, and supporting the Duvalier dictatorship from 1957-1986. The people of Haiti overthrew the dictatorship in 1986, but was saddled with its debt. The IMF provided loans that forced Haiti to privatize services and slash tariffs on rice, which destroyed the agricultural sector and drove people into sweat-shops in Port-au-Prince. The lack of local agriculture has made Haiti dependent on food aid, and--along with poverty and the privatization of electricity--forced Haitians to cut down the forests for income and charcoal for fuel.

     Twice Haitians have voted for Jean Bertrand Aristide—to restore services and raise wages—and  twice he has been overthrown by coups, in 1991 and 2004. Since then Haitians have protested against the occupying UN force, which has done nothing to improve their lives. The war against Haitian democracy has a political purpose that connects back to the original overthrow of slavery. As Haitian-Canadian Ronald Charles explained on the Real News

“you have a country independent for 200 years now, and from the beginning that was a bad example in the eyes of the big powers of the time. So when some people would say, look at them after more than 200 years look at their condition. So all the people around the world, all the people fighting for liberation, for freedom, the colonial powers will point Haiti to them and say look. For example, In Martinique and Guadelope they had elections to see if people wanted to be independent from France, some people said we don’t want that, and one of the arguments is look at Haiti. And many big powers want to use Haiti as an example of what not to do.”

NATURAL EARTHQUAKE, UNNATURAL DEATH TOLL
     Centuries of deliberate interference in Haitian democracy paved the way for two “natural disasters” this year, one geological and one biological. While a 7.0 earthquake in San Francisco in 19189 killed less than 60 people, and 7.0 earthquake in New Zealand this year killed 2, and a 9.0 earthquake in Chile this year killed 1000, a 7.0 earthquake in Haiti killed 230,000.

     This had less to do with events under the ground as on top of them—where centuries of foreign intervention has turned a wealthy and lush nation into an impoverished deforested nation, concentrated in urban slums, living in inadequately built houses on eroded soil, with almost non-existent governmental services, in the midst of a multimillion dollar occupation force that interferes with democracy and development. That the earthquake was so deadly after 6 years of UN occupation exposes its true purpose. According to Peter Hallward, author of Damning the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment:

“The international community has been effectively ruling Haiti since the 2004 coup. The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to Haiti now, however, have during the last five years consistently voted against any extension of the UN missions’ mandate beyond its immediate military purpose. Proposals to divert some of this ‘investment’ towards poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked.”

CHOLERA
     The same factors that produced a large earthquake death toll have produced conditions for the emergence of cholera. Partners in Health explain how the  environmental destruction of Haiti has magnified natural disasters, which have destroyed infrastructure—along with poverty—concentrated the population in overcrowded areas with poor sanitation:

 “in Gonaives the capital of the Artibonite has been destroyed in two waves of floods and mudslides, after tropical storm Jeanne in 2004 and after the series of hurricanes in 2008, made possible because of the environmental devastation of the region. The destruction contaminated the water supply and left the infrastructure (including the health infrastructure) of the upper Artibonite in ruins, forcing people to seek residence and medical care in St. Marc. The St. Marc region itself experienced significant flooding in 2008, displacing thousands of people. Lastly, the earthquake of January 12, 2010 resulted in the displacement of 1.7 million Haitians. While reliable statistics are not available currently, the last estimate, as of March of 2010 was that 300,000 addition Haitians had fled Port au Prince to the Artibonite. As there are no “camps” in the region, these displaced persons are “home hosted”—joining poor relatives in already overcrowded conditions, without water security or adequate sanitation. The dispersal of displaced people makes it difficult to provide centralized services.”

     In addition, Haitians are subject to poverty and a lack of food (reducing immunity), lack of transportation (impacting the precious hours between infection and death for those who have to travel to seek healthcare), and lack of healthcare. Coming 9 months after the quake, the cholera epidemic exposes how little “aid” has been provided since the quake. While ordinary Canadians delved deep into their pockets and organized fundraisers across the country, our government cynically used aid to justify a military response to the quake while announcing huge aid sums that clearly weren’t delivered. Harper announced $1 billion in aid for Haiti, and yet clearly Haitians don’t have access to the most basic services.

BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
     This is not first time the great powers have colluded in cholera epidemics, doing John Snow’s experiment in reverse. In their Orwellian-named “Sourcebook on Community Driven Development in the Africa Region—Community Action Programs”, the World Bank pushed African nations to privatize their water, explaining that “work is still needed with political leaders in some national governments to move away from the concept of free water for all.” The South African government followed suit by installing pre-paid water meters that cut people off from free water. Predictably, those who couldn’t pay drank stream water, resulting in an epidemic of cholera that killed 180 and infected 80,000.
     During the Gulf War and the sanctions that followed, the US intentionally destroyed Iraq’s water treatment facilities and blocked the importation of required equipment, knowing it could lead to cholera. As intelligence documents explain: “failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease…unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur.”
     While Bush junior was sounding the alarm on Iraq’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction”, he was maintaining sanctions that spread cholera in Iraq, while cutting funding to water treatment in Haiti. Before joining Canada to overthrow the democratically elected Aristide, Bush waged an economic war that included cutting funding for water sanitation—including to the Artibonite region currently affected by cholera. As Partners in Health explain:

“In 2000, a set of loans from the Inter American Development Bank to the government of Haiti for water, sanitation and health were blocked for political reasons. The city of St. Marc (population 220,000) and region of the lower Artibonite (population 600,000) were among the areas slated for upgrading of the public water supply. This project was delayed more than a decade and has not yet been completed. We believe secure and free access to clean water is a basic human right that should be delivered through the public sector and that the international community’s failure to assist the government of Haiti in developing a safe water supply has been violation of this basic right.” 

WATER, DEMOCRACY, AND REPARATIONS
     Humans are made up mainly of water, making access to water our most basic and life-sustaining right. That 100,000 people around the world continue to die of cholera, 150 years after its prevention was discovered, is a clear indication that people’s most basic rights are being ignored. According to Dr. Lyon from Partners in Health:

“70% of the population have no access to clean water or sanitation. People cannot protect themselves. So the country is terrified at this point. It’s a terrifying situation rooted in the lack of infrastructure, lack of sanitation and clean water, which has been very clearly slowed down by manipulation from the outside…cholera will not go away in Haiti until the conditions that make people vulnerable are changed”.

In Haiti, the fight against cholera is part of the fight for democracy--which includes the right to water, the right to their democratically-elected president Aristide instead of an unwanted UN occupation,  and the right to reparations for $21 billion taken as punishment for a slave revolution that should be celebrated. 

Whose "risky behaviour" is really spreading syphilis?

The US administration has apologized for intentionally infecting Guatemalans with syphilis. That’s right, from 1946 to 1948 American scientists intentionally infected 700 people in Guatemala—prisoners, soldiers, and psychiatric patients—with the infectious disease syphilis, in order to study the impact of penicillin. These days syphilis is blamed on people's "risky sexual behaviour"--especially men who have sex with men--so this story is an opportunity to review the history of syphilis scapegoats (and for links to other US human experiments, check out the recent entry from this wonderful blog).

SEXISM, RACISM
     In 1918, rather than divert military spending to jobs and healthcare, US President Wilson funded the creation of detention centres, some surrounded by barbed wire and guards, for the forced quarantine of tens of thousands of women convicted of prostitution. As one government official explained (and if you want to read an excellent history of this read this source of this link, Alan Brandt's No Magic Bullet: a social history of venereal disease in the United States):

“The prevention of society against moral and social murder committed by the prostitute are functions in part of the detention house and reformatory. These functions are inextricable related to the control of the dissemination of gonorrhea and syphilis through promiscuous prostitution.”

     African-Americans were also accused of spreading syphilis through promiscuity. Whereas the prison system treated poor women like criminals, the medical system treated poor blacks like guinea pigs. From 1932 to 1972, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment deliberately gave fake medicine to 400 poor black men in Alabama who had syphilis, in order to study the long term and lethal health effects of the untreated disease—which destroys the cardiac and nervous systems. Then men were told they were getting free healthcare for their “bad blood”, and were promised free money for burials if they consented to autopsy after dying.

HOMOPHOBIA
     The scapegoat for syphilis has shifted from women, to people of colour, and now to gay men. In 2003, Vancouver’s poorest neighbourhood was struck by one of the world’s largest outbreaks of syphilis. But instead of blaming poverty and healthcare cutbacks, the response was to blame gay men. A spokesperson for the BC Centre for Disease Control claimed that “we know it spreads very quickly in the gay community. Almost every other outbreak in the world is confined to that community”. Health Canada has issued similar homophobic and medically false statements, claiming that

“risky sexual behaviour among MSM (men who have sex with men) and other populations is a risking global trend. One reflection of this is the numerous outbreaks of infectious syphilis seen worldwide. In 1995, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that there were 12.2 million new cases of syphilis”.

     Mainstream medicine continues to view gay sex as inherently dangerous, leading to bans on blood donations from men who have sex with men (see my post on this issue), and ridiculous statements that syphilis is only spread by gay men. The actual WHO stats show that of 12.2 million new cases, 11 million are in the global south, and a majority are women. By blaming gay men of spreading syphilis, these statements ignore conditions of poverty and inequality that put both men and women at risk of syphilis. All the homophobic hysteria about “risky sexual behaviour” is redefining a broad public health concern as a behavioural problem of a minority group. Blaming syphilis on “risky sexual behaviour” is like blaming cholera on risky drinking behaviour or blaming tuberculosis on “risky breathing behaviour” and asking people to reduce their number of conversation partners. Living in poverty and not having access to healthcare or clean water isn’t an individual behaviour, it’s collective condition imposed on millions of people.

GLOBAL TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENT
     Millions die every year of infectious disease, not because of their individual behaviour but because they are kept in poverty and denied lifesaving medicine. Tuberculosis infects a third of humanity and remains a leading infectious causes of death 50 years after the discovery of curative treatment. Treatment also exists for malaria but lack of access to it is leading to widespread deaths. And HIV now infects 40 million people and is causing a reversal of life expectancy in countries where anti-retrovirals are not available. As a result we have a global Tuskegee experiment (for a great book on this topic, read this source, Paul Farmer's Infections and Inequalities), as six million people die every year from these three epidemics not because medicine doesn’t exist but because it is denied.
     The same governments that have given billions of dollars to banks, corporations, and the military have just intentionally underfunded the Global Fund for HIV, TB, and malaria. As Medecins Sans Frontieres announced last week, “Major donor countries have chosen to undercut the main international funding mechanism to save the lives of millions of people at risk of dying from AIDS, TB, and malaria.” The Global Fund required $20 billion to expand programmes, including $13 billion just to maintain the program, but have received only $11.7 billion. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently promised $18 billion for fighter jets, which could cover the $8 billion Global Fund shortfall twice over, or which could almost cover the entire Global Fund needs. But as MSF’s Dr. Jennifer Cohn declared, “world leaders have officially under-financed the Global Fund. This decision will result in the death of millions of people from otherwise treatable diseases.”
     This is the true risky behaviour that threatens public health, not diverse and healthy sexual expression but the deliberate maintenance of conditions that spread infections coupled with the deliberate denial of medicine to treat them.

Cancer awareness: stop the tar sands, good green jobs for all

October is breast cancer awareness month and last night Laureen Harper, the Prime Minister’s wife, helped cover the Parliament Buildings in pink light, as part of the Estée Lauder Companies’ Breast Cancer Awareness Global Illuminations Initiative. As she said, "Our message is simple - be vigilant and get regular mammograms. Connect, communicate and conquer."
     The welcome the government has provided to this initiative contrasts sharply with the reception they’ve provided to other groups raising awareness about Canada’s most notorious carcinogen: the tar sands. This difference shines a light on the problematic way in which cancer prevention is approached.

UNDERMINING COMMUNICATATION
     Communication is certainly important to raise awareness about cancer. But over the past year the tar sands corporations and the governments that support them have ignored or interfered with individuals and groups communicating about the carcinogenic tar sands.
     A tar sands worker was fired for exposing his working conditions on his blog! As he wrote,  “I do not think that purchasing the rights to develop oil leases over expanses of land greater than most European countries gives these corporations the right to drop a blanket of total secrecy over their operations, treatment of people, and conditions.”
     Recently local aboriginal leaders, fishermen, researchers and health professionals called attention to fish downstream of the tar sands which have tumours, while filmmaker James Cameron and NASA top scientists James Hansen have added their voice to the opposition. As Hansen stated, “it’s not that the government’s don’t know [about the consequences], but the governments are not doing anything.”
     Worse than this, provincial and federal governments are actively intervening to silence those drawing attention to tar sands cancer. Dr. John O’Connor, who for years has spoken out about despite threats, against the high rates of rare cancers in Fort Chipewyan near the tar sands, is raising alarm over a proposed provincial bylaw that would muzzle physicians who raise health issues in the media.
     Federally, after Greenpeace scaled Parliament to drop banners reading “climate inaction costs lives”, the government arrested activists and now arms its Parliament Hill officers with submachine guns. At the Copenhagen climate treaty, an indigenous-led delegation shamed Harper on the world stage for his commitment to carcinogenic tar sands. As Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and Tar Sands Campaigner for the Rainforest Action Network said:

“Fossil fuel extraction from the tar sands are killing our people with cancer, killing our culture by destroying our traditional lands, and killing our planet with CO2. It seems that Canada is more committed to fossil fuels than human rights or real action for the climate. Mr. Harper – We welcome you to Copenhagen because we want real action on climate, and that means shutting down the tar sands and a moratorium on new fossil fuel development.”

     Instead of shutting down the tar sands, Harper shut down Parliament—to escape popular pressure over climate change, the torture of Afghans, and the recession. But last night our tar sands government participated in a corporate-sponsored cancer awareness initiative, by a cosmetic corporation whose products may be linked to cancer. How can governments and corporations who play a role in promoting cancer feel so confident to bask in the light of cancer awareness, cynically using people’s genuine concerns to distract from their own actions? Biomedical reductionism is partly to blame.

MEDICAL DISCONNECT
     Surely the best way to conquer cancer is to understand the connections is has with modifiable aspects of our lives. But the dominance of the biomedical model decontextualizes people and their illnesses from their social and natural environments, and reduces disease to microscopic processes and individual “lifestyle choices”, for which medical intervention and “personal choices” are the only solutions. How have we done with this approach? Every year we know more about cancer and have more technology to detect and treat yet, and yet every year more people die of cancer. In fact, we are living in a pandemic of cancer: in the 1930s one in ten people developed cancer, in the 1970s it was up to one in five, and now more than one in three. While cancer was once uncommon, we now all have close family and friends with cancer.
     The failure of the biomedical approach to explain and prevent cancer is often attributed to success, with the increase in cancer attributed to better screening or living longer, as if we’re naturally pre-programmed to develop cancer. But the vast majority of cancers are not genetic (only 5% of breast cancers), many cannot be screened for (like pancreatic or lung cancer) and this level of increase far outpaces the impact of aging. I see people with cancer on a daily basis and many are less than 50—including a 30 year old man I diagnosed a few months ago with colon cancer, and a 40 year woman I just saw who died of vulvar cancer.
     This is not to say medicine does not play an important role. In fact, while there is a tremendous amount of time and resources that go into finding “the cure” for cancer, many medical advances already exist. Many cancers in the Global South are due to chronic infections for which prevention and treatment are already known but are denied due to poverty and pharmaceutical patents. Cervical cancer and much liver cancer could be prevented with access to pap smears and vaccines. Some forms of bladder cancer are caused by water-born infections that could be prevented through access to safe drinking water. The widespread availability of antiretrovirals could diminish the number of people who develop HIV-associated cancers.
     When it comes to prevention, the dominant medical model is highly selective in what carcinogens it chooses to blame. The continual rise in lung cancer is blamed solely on the dissemination of cigarettes, but cigarettes are not the only chemical to enter existence over the last century. According to the Canadian Auto Workers Prevent Cancer Campaign:

“The International Agency for the Research of Cancer has identified 24 substances that cause lung cancer in humans. Twenty-three were determined by the excess mortality of workers who were exposed to these substances. The 24th, of course, is tobacco. Why do we hear so much about the dangers of tobacco but so little about the other 23 lung carcinogens? The reason is that tobacco is claimed to be a “lifestyle” choice, so industry and the medical profession can blame the victims. The other 23 known causes of lung cancer are related to industry. They can be prevented and removed from our workplaces and our environment.”

     Since breast cancer is sensitive to estrogen, all the focus on “risk factors” are about an individual’s reproductive cycle—menstruation, conception, breastfeeding, menopause. So it came as a surprise in 2006 when a Canadian study found that women working on farms and automotive industry are far more likely to develop breast cancer. It turns out that many chemicals, like pesticides, act like estrogens in the body and increase the risk of breast cancer. When the medical model reduces women to reproductive organs, it misses the threats they face as workers in toxic environments. As the CAW guide summarizes, this is not restricted to farm or auto workers:

“Workers in certain carcinogen-laden industries are contracting cancer at rates well beyond those experienced by the general population. At least 60 different occupations have been identified as posing as increased cancer risk. Studies show that the auto industry is producing laryngeal, stomach, and colorectal cancers along with its cars. The steel industry is producing lung cancer along with its metal products. Miners experience respiratory cancers many times higher than expected. Electrical workers are suffering increased rates of brain cancer and leukemeia. Aluminum smelter workers are contracting bladder cancer. Dry cleaners have elevated rates of digestive tract cancers. Firefighters contract brain and blood-related cancers at many times the expected levels. Women in the plastics and rubber industry are at greater risk for uterine cancer and possibly breast cancer. The list goes on and on.”

CONQUER CANCER: SHUT DOWN THE TAR SANDS, GOOD GREEN JOBS FOR ALL
     By seeing cancer connected to our natural and social environments, our vigilance does not have to be reduced to screening for cancers, but can be expanded to widespread prevention—by providing access to the medical advances that treat infectious precursors to cancer, and by developing an economy based on safe and environmentally sustainable work.  So let’s expand the scope of the pink light, not only on Parliament but on the government’s toxic devotion to tar sands, and on our carcinogenic economy. Cancer prevention must include shutting down the tar sands, and expanding green jobs to save the planet and its people.

End the Ban: 5 reasons to oppose the Canadian Blood Services' ban on blood donations from men who have sex with men

An Ontario Superior judge recently dismissed a constitutional challenge of the Canadian Blood Services (CBS) ban on donations from men who had sex with men. Kyle Freeman had challenged the ban by openly lying about his sexual history, and when he was sued he counter-sued arguing his Charter rights had been violated. The court sided with CBS and ordered Freeman to pay $10,000 for filling false papers. The media have largely defended the court and the ban on the grounds that safety trumps equality, and that gay men are a risk for HIV.

Here are 5 reasons to oppose the ban:

1) The ban perpetuates a long history of homophobia
The National Post claims that “the CBS’s ban on donations from gay males is not in any way an issue of homophobia, it’s one of differing medical opinions”, implying that medical opinions are immune from homophobia. There’s a long history to the contrary. Homosexuality went from being a crime to a pathology, initially psychiatric and then a terminal illness. The gay liberation movement forced the removal of homosexuality from the list of psychiatric disorder, only to find themselves re-pathologized. When the first few people infected happened to be gay men, the medical establishment immediately labeled the new disease Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID). When it quickly became obvious that other people could become infected, the name was changed to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), but it was  blamed on “high-risk groups” known as the “four-Hs” (homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians) who were considered inherently dangerous, and blood donations from all these groups were banned. This homophobia has not ended. The National Post defended the CBS by claiming: “In choosing to continue to refuse donations from gay men, CBS is erring on the side of caution to protect our blood supply, a vital national medical resource. Any attempts to rush CBS into changing their medically defensible polices in the name of political correctness must be resisted.”[2] Run and hide, the gays are coming for our blood supply! Substitute “muslim” for “gay” for and “security” for “blood supply”, and you get the typical islamophobic argument for racial profiling.

2) The ban inappropriately focuses on demographics instead of behaviours
The homophobic sleight-of-hand that substitutes demographics for behaviours has been so ingrained that Jeffrey Simpson can pronounce in the Globe&Mail that “gay men cannot overcome the medical facts of being more susceptible to HIV”. Well, Dr. Simpson, I’d like to introduce you to Dr. Mark Wainberg, leading Canadians AIDS researcher, past president of the Canadian AIDS society and co-chair of the 2006 International AIDS Conference. Wainberg has been challenging the archaic notion of “risk groups” that have allowed homophobia to linger so long in the medical community. He recently pointed out the logical conclusion of the CBS ban: “It’s okay for a 19-year-old University of Toronto student to go out and have sex 50 times over the course of a year with a whole bunch of women that he doesn’t know, including prostitutes, that’s fine. But a gay man who has been totally monogamous for 15 years? No, that’s not okay.”

3) The ban ignores a generation of advances in AIDS research
Not only does the ban misdirect attention to sexual orientation and not sexual behaviour, but it’s become moot with the development of highly accurate HIV testing. As Wainberg pointed out, “the precautionary principle is implemented in situations in which public health is in danger, and no conclusive scientific information is available.” But that is not the case: after a generation of AIDS research we know the virus that causes it and can accurately test for it in our blood supply. According to another leading Canadian AIDS researcher, Dr. Gilmore: “Today’s technologies make it almost impossible for HIV to slip through”.

4) The ban threatens the abundance of our blood supply
So what’s the result of such an unscientific policy? It not only to discriminates against gay men and perpetuates the notion that they are inherently diseased, but also exacerbates the blood supply. As Wainberg wrote, “We clearly have a situation in which there are chronic blood shortages and we also have a situation in which gay men are totally discriminated against”. Banning donations from healthy donors whose blood will be screened does not strengthen our blood supply, it undermines it.

5) Other useless bans have been dropped
When presented with Wainberg’s writing, CBS spokesperson stated that “we don’t think Canadians want to be guinea pigs”, as if getting an accurately screened transfusion from a healthy and generous blood donor who also happened at one time since 1977 to have had one sexual encounter with another male is akin to human experimentation. As well as being inflammatory, this statement is highly misleading about the dynamics of bans. The book When Germs Travel includes a chapter on the Haitian community’s inspiring campaign to remove the ban from their blood, which was successful. As Gilmore pointed out, “Other jurisdictions, like Australia, have already replaced the lifetime ban with more balanced and realistic policies. And I think it’s time that Canada and the U.S. did the same.”

When Stephen Harper boycotted the 2006 International AIDS Conference, Wainberg said he was “on the wrong side of history”. The CBS ban, and the court that upheld it, are on that same wrong side. But the same mobilizations that ended the ban on blood donations from Haitians can reverse the longstanding homophobic, unscientific, and harmful ban on blood donations from men who have had sex with men.

To read more about AIDS politics and activism, check out Brett Stockdrill's Activism against AIDS: at the intersection of sexuality, race, gender and class, Paul Farmer's Women, poverty, and AIDS: sex, drugs, and structural violence, and Steven Epstein's Impure science: AIDS, activism, and the politics of knowledge. And go here for more information of the Canadian Federation of Student’s campaign against the ban.