Antinuclear

Medical experts say lending to Adani is the same as supporting big tobacco High-profile doctors say Carmichael coalmine poses a ‘grave danger to public health’, including from air pollution and black lung disease, Guardian, Melissa Davey 6 June 2017, Lending money to Indian mining giant Adani to build a rail line for the Carmichael coal project is akin to supporting big tobacco to transport hundreds of tonnes of tobacco to market, an eminent former surgeon and the chair of Doctors for the Environment Australia, Prof Kingsley Faulkner, said.Faulkner made the comment in a letter to the chair of the government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (Naif), Sharon Warburton, in which he urged her and other board members to rule out an investment loan to build the rail line from the mine at the Galilee basin in Queensland to the Abbot Point port.

He wrote that the Carmichael mine posed a “grave danger to public health both in Australia and globally”, given coalmines leading to a resurgence among mine workers of a chronic, irreversible and previously eradicated lung condition known as black lung disease.

The pollution from coal also causes childhood asthma, heart and lung disease, and some cancers, he added.

“Going ahead with it will send a terrible message to the world – [that] we in Australia really don’t care about the planet, or its inhabitants,” Faulkner wrote.

A number of high-profile doctors and researchers were signatories to Faulkner’s letter, including leading child and public health researcher Prof Fiona Stanley and the former chair of the Western Sydney Local Health District Board, Prof Stephen Leeder. Both are members of Doctors for the Environment Australia’s scientific advisory committee…….https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/06/medical-experts-say-lending-to-adani-is-the-same-as-supporting-big-tobacco