Letters
Respiratory disease
Volume 188 - Issue 9

Records of the Australian Mesothelioma Surveillance Program have been lost!

Author:  Marc Hendrickx

Med J Aust 2008; 188 (9): 552. || doi: 10.5694/j.1326-5377.2008.tb01785.x
Published online: 5 May 2008
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To the Editor: I recently received written advice from the Australian Safety and Compensation Council (a division of the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations) that the records of the Australian Mesothelioma Surveillance Program (AMSP) have been lost.

As some of your readers would be aware, the AMSP, which ran between 1980 and 1985, was one of the most comprehensive medical surveys of mesothelioma undertaken anywhere in the world.1 The records of the program contain full occupational and environmental histories of about 1000 mesothelioma cases reported in the early 1980s. The program has played a significant role in helping to understand the epidemiology of mesothelioma in Australia. The level of detail of data in the AMSP has not been repeated by the Australian Mesothelioma Register, which succeeded the AMSP in 1985. This less detailed reporting scheme is the current basis for mesothelioma reporting to cancer registries in the country.

I am a geologist with an interest in medical geology currently studying to obtain a doctorate on naturally occurring asbestos and mesothelioma risk in Australia. I had hoped to use the detailed environmental and occupational data of the AMSP to help determine the possible influence of naturally occurring asbestos on mesothelioma in Australia, in particular in the eastern states and South Australia, but without the records this is no longer possible. Data from the Australian Mesothelioma Register are not sufficiently detailed for this purpose.

My intention in writing this letter is not to embarrass staff from the Australian Safety and Compensation Council, who have done their best to find the records and have been supportive of the project, but to create awareness of the loss, in the hope that the publicity may jog someone’s memory and result in the records being located. The potential permanent loss of these records would be a great loss to mesothelioma research in Australia and raises questions about the federal government’s policies surrounding long-term storage and archiving of nationally significant scientific research datasets that may be of benefit to future researchers.

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