Announcing the www.WorldAsbestosReport.org web site
I wrote before that one of our areas of interest is the international effort to ban the use of asbestos. It is ironic that much of the rest of the world is far ahead of the United States in this effort. My partners and I, through The Kazan, McClain, Abrams, Fernandez, Lyons, Greenwood, Oberman, Satterley & Bosl Foundation, Inc, have been major supporters of the organized global efforts to ban asbestos. Over the years, I think it fair to say that we have been the single largest financial supporter of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat, whose mission is stated in its very title. IBAS has helped organize and coordinate many meetings around the world devoted to asbestos awareness, education, and efforts to outlaw future use of asbestos. We came to realize that much of these materials produced at these international meetings was disappearing. Often, the meetings are small and not terribly well funded, and whatever informational materials they produced were not widely distributed beyond actual attendees. Nor were they generally available online.
I am very pleased to announce that we have found a way to solve that problem. We are sponsoring a new web site, now up and running, called www.WorldAsbestosReport.org. It is just that – a place we are making available for anyone hosting or organizing meetings related to asbestos use, asbestos disease, and efforts to solve the problems of such use, so that they can post calendar information about these meetings to a worldwide audience, and then post the actual program materials for all to see. We are inaugurating this web site with two landmark contributions.
IBAS and others organized the Global Asbestos Conference as an ongoing institution. The first conference was held in Brazil in 2000 and the second was held in Tokyo in 2004. The proceedings of both conferences were prepared and published on CD-ROM. These materials include not only the traditional forms of medical and scientific papers, but photographs, video clips, multimedia presentations, and a whole host of fascinating information. My firm contributed the funds needed to produce and distribute these annals on CD, and we have now posted them in their entirety on www.WorldAsbestosReport.org with most portions available in both .html and .pdf formats, and all fully searchable. Please drop by and visit it and let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.
-Steven Kazan.