Despite coroner?s urging, Ontario lacking policy on environmental illness

The Ontario coroner wrote after a suicide in June, 1989, in Timmins. The victim had been denied benefits on the basis of a hateful article by Donna Stewart and Joel Raskin in the CMAJ. It would take this second article before the three DM?s the coroner wrote would do anything, and then it was only the Ministries of Community and Social Services and Housing that responded. The Ontario Ministry of Health continued to lie about the fact that the 1985 Thomson report had identified an existing, publicly insured method of diagnosis, and that the OMA felt that the social needs of patients should be addressed.