PRIESKA (South Africa): Robert Devenish has resigned himself to an agonising death of asbestos-induced cancer, a silent but cruel killer stalking mining communities in South Africa’s Northern Cape province.

“Nobody wants to die suffering, but we don’t all have a choice,” said the 64-year-old former mine employee who was diagnosed with mesothelioma last December and given months to live.

Mesothelioma is a non-curable cancer of the lung lining that can take up to 40 years from asbestos exposure to develop. It condemns its victims to a painful and breathless end, usually about 18 months after diagnosis.

Devenish is one of tens of thousands of South Africans, most of them in small Northern Cape towns, who contracted asbestos-related diseases (ARDs) — a hangover from the country’s heyday as one of the world’s top producers of the substance believed as far back as the 1920s to pose serious health risks.

Asbestos mining stopped in South Africa in the mid-1980s, but people are still being diagnosed with ARDs like mesothelioma and asbestosis on a regular basis, while many more continue to be at risk from unrehabilitated sites.

Several uses for asbestos, once a popular insulator due to its heat resistant properties, have been banned around the world.

And foreign-owned mining companies have in the past six years paid out tens of millions of dollars in settlements from which an estimated 10,000 South African victims of their asbestos extracting activities have benefited so far.

Mesothelioma sufferers like Devenish got just over $4,000 each, small comfort for a dying man.Prieska doctor Gideon Smith said his longest-surviving mesothelioma patient died two years after being diagnosed. But some are known to have lived for five years.

“Every time somebody comes to me with a lung ailment, the first thought is asbestos. It is almost always the case,” said Smith.

One of his patients, 68-year-old Petrus van Nell, has taken to bed with mesothelioma without much hope of rising from it again.—AFP