Asbestos: A Corporate Coverup, a Public Health Catastrophe
February 01, 2025 at 02:05AMIn this in-depth read on asbestos, Charlotte Bailey reports that this “killer dust” is present in many buildings in the UK—homes, hospitals, schools, and older buildings—and responsible for thousands of deaths each year. For a long time, asbestos, a fibrous mineral found in the earth’s crust, had been considered desirable because of its resistance to heat and corrosion. During World War II, it was used in manufacturing and shipbuilding, and after the war, was viewed as “the mineral of victory and safety” and essential for the future. In the mid-1900s and on, however, companies discovered the truth: Asbestos was a health risk to all, not just to workers in factories, but to the general public. For years, the companies buried their findings—one American company, Johns-Manville, secretly removed the lungs “of between 55 and 75 Canadian asbestos miners who had died in the company hospital” and smuggled them across the border, hiding evidence.
Bailey’s research and reporting here are vital, but what makes this feature even more notable is how she recounts her own father’s health decline: He died from mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer that affects the lining of the lungs and other organs, which is usually caused by exposure to asbestos. Was he a factory worker? No. He was an accountant.
Nancy Tait, whose husband died of mesothelioma in 1968 after exposure to asbestos as a telephone engineer, did not believe the industry’s defence. Tait expected there would be many more like her husband who would die from exposure to asbestos in buildings. Armed with just a school education, she became a self-taught expert in asbestos diseases and convinced an east London hospital to help her profile their mesothelioma patients. Her results showed that all had been exposed to asbestos, but none had worked for the asbestos industry. They’d been plumbers, housewives and mechanics, a school building inspector and a teacher. Electron microscope analysis of the lungs of an office worker who died from mesothelioma showed the same type of asbestos fibre that had been sprayed onto her office ceiling. Wives died after breathing in asbestos fibres from the clothes of their dockworker husbands. A woman who laid her coat on her sleeping son during cold winter nights on her return from work at an asbestos factory in Leeds did not know she was killing him. He died in 1988, aged 43, from mesothelioma.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/31/asbestos-a-corporate-coverup-a-public-health-catastrophe/
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