Twenty years of social conflicts around an asbestos grinding site.

International audienceIntroductionThe CMMP (Comptoir des Minéraux et des Matières Premières) is a former mineral grinding plant whose activity "asbestos" continued from the 1930s to the mid-1970s. Responsible of an important occupational and environmental contamination, the CMMP generated a huge number of Asbestos Related Diseases in its immediate environment that have initially been identified by a group of associations. The “citizen mobilizations” - following the death of a former student attending a school near the plant - were the driving force of several answers from French health authorities. We will question this process. MethodsThe associations’ willingness has led to the identification of environmental pollution victims. These "citizen-experts" have collected many data: diagnostics, residence addresses and dates, professional careers, types of asbestos exposures etc. We highlight the impact of a citizens' initiative in the emergence of a public health issue and propose - by using a geographic information system - a spatial overview of the data collected by the associations (e.g. victims) or generated by public health agencies (e.g. pollution dispersion modeling). ResultsCollective mobilizations around this site led to several institutional responses such as: a public health impact study (2007), a feasibility study of a post environmental exposure monitoring (2012) and very recently, a research program involving officially associations and researchers (2016). The census started allows today to spatialize nearly 150 potential victims of this industrial site.ConclusionThis example questions the processes leading to the visibility of a public health issue and demonstrates the impact of collective mobilizations in the institutional response to an industrial poisoning