Asbestos: a corporate coverup, a public health catastrophe

Written by Charlotte Bailey on March 4, 2025. Posted in Current News

In the UK, thousands of people are still dying every year from exposure to the asbestos fibres in our homes, schools and workplaces. My dad was one of them

The day our lives changed forever we were on the Dorset coast, on our first family holiday since Dad had turned 65 and retired.

Cold waves hit warm skin, smooth green hills sloped gently into the gleaming water, my little niece scampered in the sand, the dogs dashed into the waves, and Dad was happy, as he always was when we were enjoying the countryside together.

My two brothers and I were brought up to love the outdoors. In our family albums the three of us peer through mist on top of mountains, cling to the side of cliffs, perch proudly on bikes, plunge oars into winding rivers.

The adventures continued into our thirties. But that day, after swimming, Dad couldn’t catch his breath. His oxygen levels plummeted; Mum called an ambulance.

In the hospital he was asked over and over what he’d done for a living and if he’d worked with asbestos. There was not yet an official diagnosis, but there were rumblings of a disease called mesothelioma, a terminal cancer that usually affects the lining of the lung, sometimes the stomach or occasionally other organs. It is almost always caused by asbestos.

“But what would I do without you?” Mum’s question was sincere. They’d met on a Putney tennis court as teenagers and married in their early twenties. The next four decades were hectic with child-raising and work, but I remember how much laughter they shared.

There was no laughter that day. Most mesothelioma patients are dead within a year of diagnosis, many within eight months.

We were baffled. The time between exposure to asbestos and mesothelioma symptoms varies widely, from the typical 30 to 40 years to as few as 10 or as many as 70. But historically that link has been easy to identify.

The typical mesothelioma patient was a retired industrial worker with clear asbestos exposure. Dad had been an accountant.

I had only the haziest understanding of asbestos as some dangerous substance used in decades past. But as I cared for my father, I learned how it came to be ubiquitous in our infrastructure.

How it was blended into cement, vinyl floor tiles and insulation; car brake linings and gaskets; household products from mattresses to dishtowels. The list could go on and on. And it did go on and on, for long after its dangers were known.

Asbestos is thought by many in the UK to be a problem of the past. Anti-asbestos campaigners fought corporate coverups and government inaction for decades, and eventually secured a total ban in the UK in 1999.

The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) says that the number of asbestos-related annual deaths—currently at least 5,000 including 2,500 from mesothelioma—will soon fall, as the impact of the ban finally materialises.

In other words, the important fights have been fought and mistakes corrected. My father was a character in the epilogue of an old story.

But activists are still fighting a billion-dollar industry that is backed by a powerful and often ruthless lobby with operatives acting globally, including in London. Worldwide consumption of asbestos has declined from two million tonnes in 2000 to 1.3m tonnes today, but it remains big business.

It is still produced in Russia, Kazakhstan, China and Brazil. Consumption is mostly in Asia, particularly China and India.

Asbestos remains in most UK schools and hospital trusts, and likely in more than 1.5m houses and flats—though the true number is unknown. Mesothelioma victims in the UK are increasingly likely to be teachers, nurses, musicians and accountants—like my dad—who are contracting the disease after working in crumbling, asbestos-filled buildings.

Victims continue to confront illnesses that are impossible to cure, difficult to palliate and entirely preventable.

The modern asbestos industry began in the 1850s and grew with industrialisation. Steam engines, blast furnaces and mass production required the strength and heat-proof properties of asbestos.

Even then, there was evidence of its harm. In 1898, factory inspectors in the UK identified the “evil effects” of asbestos, and said the danger to workers’ health was “easily demonstrated”. By 1918 many insurers would not offer life cover to asbestos workers.

In 1924, 33-year-old Nellie Kershaw, who had worked at a Rochdale asbestos factory spinning raw asbestos into yarn, was the first person whose death was officially attributed to asbestos.

She died of asbestosis, a disease caused by prolonged exposure to the substance. The illness varies in severity, but at its worst causes extreme breathlessness and an incessant and bloody cough that allows no rest, day or night. It is often debilitating and sometimes fatal.

The prevalence of asbestosis among textile workers prompted a government inquiry. A 1928 report and a followup in 1933 said asbestos workers who toiled in dusty conditions were unlikely to survive 10 years on the job, and none who had worked there since leaving school would reach 30.

In the UK, the report led to regulation on acceptable levels of dust, medical surveillance and compensation, but no plans were made to reduce asbestos consumption. “Chemicals and oils had been causing industrial cancers in European workers since the late 19th century,” write Geoffrey Tweedale and Jock McCulloch in their book Defending the Indefensible. “[I]ndustrial diseases and deaths were readily accepted and absorbed by a system that regarded them as an inevitable and necessary by-product of industrialization.”

Global consumption soared during the Second World War, when asbestos was used in armaments manufacture and shipbuilding. So essential was it to the war effort that the British government temporarily took over asbestos manufacturer Turner & Newall (T&N) to guarantee supply.

After the war, asbestos became the mineral of victory and safety. It became a desirable material not just in manufacturing but in buildings and household products too. Asbestos became the mineral of the future.

As a historian of environmental contamination, Jessica van Horssen is not easily shocked. She knew, for example, that the American asbestos company Johns-Manville hid workers’ own health records from them.

The company, which would file for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1982, before reorganising a few years later, had a large mine in Quebec, Canada—the Jeffrey Mine, in a town which was then called Asbestos.

To defend against reports that asbestos was making British factory workers sick, which threatened their business, they said these illnesses were caused not by the mineral itself but by the extreme dustiness of the factories or contaminants in the asbestos.

Its own exceptionally pure form of asbestos and working conditions were safe, it claimed. For this argument to stand, its Jeffrey Mine workers had to appear healthy.

Internally, the company was in a panic and wanted to develop its own understanding of the dangers of asbestos without their workers or the public finding out. In the early 1930s, Johns-Manville had set up a clinic, which evolved into a hospital in the 1940s, ostensibly to care for workers.

Company doctors did not tell their patients of any concerns, but reported instead to their bosses in New York. This was justified as kindness: “As long as the man is not disabled, it is felt that he should not be told of his condition so that he can live and work in peace and the Company can benefit by his many years of experience,” wrote a company doctor in an internal memo. “Should the man be told of his condition today there is a very definite possibility that he would become mentally and physically ill, simply through the knowledge that he has asbestosis.”

The company also funded the Saranac Laboratory, an occupational health research facility in upstate New York, on the condition that they would control the publication of any research findings.

The director of Saranac, a scientist called Leroy Gardner, conducted experiments on mice so the company could understand what levels of asbestos dust might be safe. Instead, in 1943, he accidentally discovered that asbestos not only caused asbestosis, but lung cancer too.

He suggested the experiment be repeated, but died three years later, and his findings were effectively buried. Scientific proof that asbestos caused cancer would not be published until 1955.

This was the background to Van Horssen’s discovery in 2008 that, between 1944 and 1958, Johns-Manville secretly removed the lungs of between 55 and 75 Canadian asbestos miners who had died in the company hospital.

The company lawyer, Ivan Sabourin, smuggled the lungs in his car and drove across the border to the Saranac Laboratory. If there was a safe level of asbestos dust to be found, it was clear these workers had not experienced it, for embedded in their lungs were vast amounts of asbestos fibres.

Johns-Manville buried the finding and told families the company did not conduct autopsies, precluding many compensation claims. “That shocked me,” Van Horssen told me. “It was profoundly cynical.”

The current theory is that inhaled asbestos fibres are neither expelled nor broken down by the body

In the late 1950s, epidemiologist Chris Wagner was researching asbestosis and lung cancer around the asbestos mines of South Africa when he discovered an epidemic of previously little-known tumours called mesotheliomas.

He published his research in 1960, and presented it at a major conference on the biological effects of asbestos in New York in 1964.

Scientists still don’t know how asbestos causes mesothelioma, but the current theory is that inhaled asbestos fibres are neither expelled nor broken down by the body. Over time, they are thought to damage DNA, promote abnormal cell repair and alter chromosome structure.

While asbestosis only develops with extended exposure to asbestos, mesothelioma can develop after far less. Asbestosis was an asbestos worker’s disease; mesothelioma was a wider threat.

At the conference, Molly Newhouse, a London-based epidemiologist, demonstrated mesotheliomas among people who lived near an asbestos factory; Irving Selikoff, a New York doctor, proved the link between insulation work and mesothelioma; Wilhelm Hueper, an American cancer expert, emphasised that groups previously considered safe—from repair men to lab technicians and office workers—were at risk.

All the assumptions about asbestos collapsed. Asbestos diseases were not a result of working conditions but the dangerous nature of asbestos itself. It was dubbed “killer dust” by the media. The horrific nature of the disease added to the panic.

As one doctor put it, “[Mesothelioma] is perhaps the most terrible cancer known, in which the decline is the most spectacular, the most cruel.” Victims literally suffocated to death.

By the end of November my own father was suffocating. He coughed almost constantly, and a simple walk around the block for fresh air was a struggle. He monitored his oxygen levels every few hours.

It was eerily reminiscent of his pre-illness practice of monitoring and recording his heartrate and blood pressure after his morning run with Amber, the family Alsatian. Now his statistics only declined.

Little progress had been made in mesothelioma treatments until just a few weeks before his diagnosis, when a breakthrough immunotherapy was made available on the NHS. Immunotherapy helps the immune system recognise and attack cancer cells.

It tends to be better tolerated and response to it more enduring than with chemotherapy, which is a blunter instrument. It can work well, with some patients surviving years rather than months. But on average, it boosts survival by just one and half months, and for many it makes no difference.

The week before Christmas, I accompanied Dad to his pre-treatment blood tests. He was so desperately weak by then that the nurse let him rest in the blood test chair. It came as no great surprise when the specialist told him the treatment had failed.

The cancer had grown fast and wrapped itself around his lung. Chemotherapy remained an option but, like the immunotherapy, was more likely than not to fail, and success would likely only mean a few more months.

The doctor said declining treatment would be a reasonable choice. “No,” he said, gasping for air, “let’s attack it.” The doctor nodded. She recommended we get in touch with the hospice, nevertheless.

This is taken from a long document, read the rest here prospectmagazine.co.uk

Header image: Shekhawati Hospital

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