By Simon Shepherd
After battling for 20 years, thousands of former sawmill workers have finally won recognition that they may have been poisoned.
A special health service is being set up to screen for the symptoms of a chemical widely used to preserve timber.
For more than 30 years, sawmills treated timber with the preservative pentachlorophenol, or PCP.
For another two decades, workers exposed to the chemical have claimed they were poisoned - and now after a breakthrough study, authorities agree.
"So that was when we worked with other agencies and realised that we need to do something to support the former workers," says Sally Gilbert, Ministry of Health.
So about 150 former workers from the Bay of Plenty were bussed into one of the most affected towns, Whakatane, to hear that from November, a new service would give them:
* annual free health checks - designed to screen for PCP poisoning
* doctors would be educated to recognise a range of symptoms
* there would also be a facilitation service for former workers.
"We see it as progress with a capital P to get us to a place where we thought that we would never get to," says Joe Harawria, Sawmill Workers Against Poisons.
To qualify, workers only have to prove they'd worked with PCP for a year.
But there was anger it had taken so long, and that the package didn't look after future generations.
"This package has no regard for our children and our wives and our family," says Matia Kohe, former worker.
"The health service is just for the sawmill workers themselves," says Ms Gilbert.
The ministry will review the new service and consider further research into the lingering affects of PCP.
A modern shopping place now stands where the Whakatane mill used to be, but its legacy continues in the form of contaminated sites around town and in the blood of former workers.
But those workers say they can now focus on the next step, and that is getting compensation.
3 News
source: newshub archive
