Do ya think this is why Bush announced last week that he wanted to cap off asbestos lawsuits for his Corporate Buddies?
January 13th, 2005
Wrapped in a brown sweater, to protect himself against the Egyptian winter, a man turns the coals of a camp-fire to keep the water boiling for tea at a makeshift shanty-town in front of the blue iron fence that encircles a shuttered factory in an industrial suburb of north-west Cairo.
A group of men from the camp gather to chat and tell their stories to curious visitors or passers-by. Gamal Mansuer, an older man with a white beard, holds up an inhaler and a small breathing machine.
“I can’t breathe because there is asbestos in my lungs,” explains Mansuer, who was recently fired after working at the factory for 15 years. He is one of 90 employees who have been laid off from Aura-Misr, a Spanish-Egyptian asbestos company.
Today, he and his fellow workers, sleep outside the factory every night on a brown blanket under a lean–to constructed from a black tarpaulin attached to the factory fence. Eight of his colleagues have already died from lung cancer and asbestosis and almost all of the 46 others, who live at this protest camp, currently suffer from the diseases.
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http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11791