Volume 188 - Issue 9
Records of the Australian Mesothelioma Surveillance Program have been lost!
Author: Julie Hill
Med J Aust 2008; 188 (9): 552. || doi: 10.5694/j.1326-5377.2008.tb01786.x
Published online: 5 May 2008
Published online: 5 May 2008
Comment: The Australian Mesothelioma Surveillance Program (AMSP) operated between 1980 and 1985 and was maintained by the Commonwealth School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Sydney. These files were transferred to the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission (NOHSC) on its establishment in 1985. The NOHSC was relocated from Sydney to Canberra in 2001, and AMSP records went into storage at that time.
In February 2005, the NOHSC was succeeded by the Australian Safety and Compensation Council. We attempted to locate the records over several months in 2007. This involved manually searching through all files and boxes held by our contracted storage company marked as relating to either the AMSP or the Australian Mesothelioma Register. In addition, we had a staff member of the storage facility manually search the warehouse for these records in case they were in unmarked boxes or filing cabinets.
In November 2007, having been unable to locate the records, we informed Mr Hendrickx that we would be unable to assist him with access to the AMSP records for his doctoral studies.
It is certainly not our policy to discard records such as these and we were disappointed when they could not be easily located. We regret the potential loss of these important records to the research community and are still attempting to locate them.