Over many decades during the twentieth century certain sectors of the workforce, amounting to hundreds of thousands of men and women undertook employment in the course of which they had to inhale carcinogenic asbestos dust, due to either ignorance, accident or their employer’s wilful negligence or carelessness as to their health and safety. Most affected by this lethal exposure to asbestos were those employed in the mining, shipbuilding, construction and manufacturing sectors. The effects of this exposure turned out to be a time bomb in terms of their health.
Many exposed to the deadly asbestos fibres, which made up the dust, did not experience any medically diagnosable symptoms for many years, sometimes not until three or four decades had elapsed since they were first or last exposed and so we are now only just beginning to appreciate the appalling legacy of the last century’s love affair with asbestos containing materials. Due to this time lag in the symptoms developing, asbestos exposure has now become, according to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the biggest cause of work-related deaths in the UK.
This deadly trend is not expected to peak until the end of the current decade after which it will tail off, reflecting the bans on the mining and use of asbestos introduced by the UK Government during the last years of the twentieth century and the contribution of the health and safety legislation specifically addressing the control of asbestos exposure passed into law since. At the moment, however, increasing numbers of people continue to be diagnosed with asbestos related diseases, each one a personal tragedy which could have been avoided.
The HSE recorded 2,347 deaths from Mesothelioma, 2,000 deaths from asbestos related lung cancer and 412 deaths from Asbestosis in 2010, with many hundreds of new diagnoses occurring every year for each the main asbestosis-related diseases; Mesothelioma, Asbestosis and Pleural Thickening. There were 725 new cases of Asbestosis diagnosed in 2010 alone.
We are fortunate in the UK that the scourge of asbestos was finally addressed. Outside our shores the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that there are 125,000,000 people still exposed to asbestos in their workplaces, with one in three of every occupational cancers diagnosed being directly attributable to asbestos. This figure doesn’t include the tens of thousands who the WHO estimates die as a result of being exposed to asbestos in their own homes.
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