Migrant workers and cancer patterns in Southern Africa

Wide geographic variations in the occurrence of disease have been documented and subjected to study since Hippocrates' famous comments on the aetiologic effects of Airs, Waters and Places four centuries before Christ.' An ideal methodological enquiry he then postulated would be into relationships between patterns of ill-health and both the way of life and the natural surroundings of man. Yet for centuries the grand-scale experiments already set up in this way by Nature have yielded little of medical benefit, largely for the reason that scientifically comparable standards of diagnosis have not been available. The work of Percival Pott in recognising the occupational risk of scrotal cancer among lads sweeping chimneys in 1775 was a major landmark2 and so too was the cholera epidemiology of Acland and Snow in the 1840s and 1850s.3 Nonetheless major attempts to unravel the clues to disease causation hidden in naturally occurring distributional patterns have awaited advances both in standards of diagnostic recording and in demographic base information about populations under risk that have only become generally available in this century. One classic type of opportunity for such study occurs when migrants from contrasted backgrounds come together into a single environment, preferably under a single medical authority. The 'guest-worker' phenomenon has hit the industrial countries of Europe only since the mid1950s but a comparable migrant stream has been moving from several distinct rural areas of southern Africa to labour at the diamond and gold diggings of South Africa for close on a century. In 18 74, 10,000 Africans were employed at Kimberley and, by 1899, the total there and on the Rand had reached 99,0004 and a major recruiting organization had been set up to mobilize the supply of workers from neighbouring as well as Dr Jack Harington is a senior member of the Cancer Research Unit at the South African Institute for Medical Research, Johannesburg. Dr Neil McGlashan was a member of the staff of the Cancer Research Unit and is now the Senior Lecturer in Geography in the University of Tasmania. He is also a member of the International Geography Union's Commission for Medical Geography

Geography · Political science · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Gender Studies · Global Health Workforce Issues · HIV/AIDS Impact and Responses · T-cell and Retrovirus Studies

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