Cancer and Industrial Pollution
An ongoing investigation by the Socialist Equality Party

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Hundreds pay tribute
to Melissa Cristiano


Depite teeming rain, more than 1,500 working class people came to the funeral of Melissa Cristiano last week to pay tribute to her courage and determination. Still one day short of her 21st birthday, Melissa died in her Shellharbour home on February 10 after an 18-month battle against leukaemia.

Well before her funeral began, the Roman Catholic church of St Francis of Assisi at Warrawong was filled to overflowing. Many people had to catch glimpses of the service from outside.
Among the crowd were students and teachers from Warrawong High School, Melissa's old school, and scores of former Warrawong students. At least one-third of those in attendance were young people, some in their work clothes.

Working people of many different nationalities came from the suburbs surrounding the southern end of the BHP steelworks -- Warrawong, Lake Heights, Port Kembla, Berkeley and Cringila -- where at least 15 young people have contracted leukaemia since 1989. Before the service commenced, they queued many rows deep to sign the condolence book.

Later, hundreds drove to Shellharbour Cemetery to join Melissa's husband Nick, mother Judy, father Will and other members of her family in bidding her a final farewell.

Melissa Cristiano was the second of Wollongong's leukaemia victims to die within two days, following the death of former Warrawong High School teacher Bob Churton, aged 42.

Their tragic deaths provided a further demonstration of the terrible toll taken by the disease. Bob Churton died despite an initially successful bone marrow transplant from a cousin last October. The transplant had given him a 70 percent chance of at least another five years of life, but he developed viral pneumonia due to his weakened immune system.

Melissa Cristiano died without finding a compatible bone marrow donor, even after a worldwide search. Workers and their families throughout Wollongong donated tens of thousands of dollars to help pay for overseas donor tests, but to no avail.


Why they came

Hundreds came to the funeral, not simply to pay their respects to Melissa as an individual. Many in the crowd would not have met her personally. Their attendance expressed a deepening and widening concern over the mounting leukaemia death toll and a heartfelt appreciation for Melissa's role in first raising the issue.

Without her insistent struggle the leukaemia crisis would have remained covered up by the government and the public health authorities. In spite of her own severe illness, she tirelessly demanded answers for the high incidence of leukaemias among Warrawong High students and other young people.

The daughter of a steelworks coke ovens worker, she was diagnosed with leukaemia in September 1995, just one month after she was married. When she discovered that three other former Warrawong High students had contracted the disease, she contacted the Illawarra Public Health Unit, but no-one from the Unit even returned her call.

After a month's delay, she spoke to the Illawarra Mercury, the region's daily capitalist newspaper. The Mercury attempted to sensationalise the leukaemia cases as a mysterious "cancer curse" afflicting Warrawong High. Its reports linked the victims to the spraying of a pesticide on the school grounds but scientists quickly dismissed that suggestion.

Even when Melissa rang the Health Unit a second time, seeking information on the lead levels at the school and the testing of the underlying landfill, made up of steelworks slag, she received no reply until she was already ill in hospital.

In the meantime, in a bid to silence the public outcry generated by the news of the leukaemia victims, the state Labor government set up a so-called investigation by the Health Unit, with BHP sitting on the inquiry's appointed steering committee.


Media hypocrisy

The same forces -- the Carr government, the Health Unit and the Mercury -- which have sought from the beginning to carry out a whitewash of the leukaemias and their probable industrial causes are now trying to bury the issue, together with Melissa.

The day after the news of Melissa's death, the Health Unit's director, Dr Victoria Westley-Wise, was featured prominently in the Mercury, expressing her gratitude for Melissa's bravery in bringing the issue to the Unit's attention.

But the same Westley-Wise has declared that the Unit's report, which has been postponed until the end of April, is unlikely to establish any causes for the leukaemias. Westley-Wise has canvassed all manner of extremely remote possibilities, such as pets carrying viruses. She has condemned out of hand the evidence gathered by Workers News pointing to a direct relationship between cancer rates and distance of residence from the Port Kembla smokestacks.

Likewise, the Mercury published an editorial entitled "Brave Melissa deserves our gratitude". The next day the same paper ran a front-page banner headline and story promoting comments by Premier Carr denouncing residents for taking legal action to challenge the reopening of the copper smelter, one of the prime suspects in the leukaemia crisis.

The Mercury's real position on the leukaemia issue was revealed in an editorial last October 7, when it demanded that the local tourism authorities "go into damage control" by telling the rest of the world that cancers only affected "a small section of the Wollongong community". Its concern is business profits, not the health and lives of workers and their families.

The clearest expression of the effort to bury the fight initiated by Melissa came in the sermon delivered to the funeral service by the priest, Father Terrence Moughton. He claimed that her courage and selflessness were born of a belief that it was God's will that she die. He insisted that it was dangerous and wrong to demand answers for deaths such as Melissa's. "It is not for us to know why this has happened, let alone to question God's will," he stated.

The priest's theme was taken up the next day in a column written by the Mercury's editor-in-chief, Peter Cullen. "Unless there is faith in God and the way He works, then none of the us could cope with the cruelties and uncertainties of life," Cullen wrote, paraphrasing the sermon.

The truth is that far from passively accepting her lot, Melissa remained intent on doing everything in her power to expose the causes of the leukaemias and to prevent her fate from being suffered by other young people.

"We have to keep searching until we find an answer, looking at the industries and the common factors between everybody," she said in an interview with Workers News published on October 18.

She continued: "It's about time that something was done about it. We don't know what the problem is, but if it is BHP, to them the loss of five or six lives is nothing for the amount of money they make. If they can just pay people out to keep them quiet, it is just not good enough.
"We can't afford to keep losing lives, especially when they are so young. Everyone's got to start coming forward and saying what they feel.

"This has been going on for too long. Benzene [a by-product of coke-making in the steelworks] has been known for so long as a cause of leukaemia."

The present powers-that-be, both secular and clerical, recognise that when such a determined fight is taken up by wider layers of youth, students and working people, fundamental political issues are raised.

Last November Melissa Cristiano sent a message from her hospital bed to a public meeting organised by the Socialist Equality Party in Cringila to discuss the convening of an independent workers inquiry into the leukaemia crisis.

It is a passionate call for the working class to come forward to establish the truth about the leukaemia deaths and to challenge the system which is responsible for them.

The Committee for a Workers Inquiry established as a result of that public meeting is now preparing evidence, statements and submissions. The Workers Inquiry will probe all the surrounding circumstances, including the role of BHP and other major companies, successive governments, the public health authorities and the trade union leaders. We urge all victims and their families, concerned residents, steelworkers and other workers, doctors, health workers and scientists to actively participate in the work of this inquiry.

See Also:
Melissa Cristiano: Her message to the SEP public meeting

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