Great Britain’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the agency responsible for ensuring that risks to people’s health and safety from work activities are properly controlled, has released a new video designed to help tradespeople understand the dangers of asbestos.
Released in conjunction with last week’s Action Mesothelioma Day, the video – entitled “Asbestos: The Hidden Killer” – features the real life story of carpenter Tom King, who suffers from malignant pleural mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer for which the only known cause is exposure to asbestos.
The video comes of the heels of a recent study by the HSE which demonstrated that the majority of young tradesmen in Britain are unaware of the health hazards of the dangerous mineral.
In the film, Tom King speaks candidly of his struggles with mesothelioma, which generally kills its victims within a year or two of diagnosis.
“It’s taken away 85% of what I do, my life has been cut short. If I had known of the dangers of the asbestos when I was younger I would have taken the right precautions. If I’m very lucky I’ll say I’ve got three years left, but it may just be a year.”
Judith Hackitt, chair of the Health and Safety Commission, stressed the importance of the commission’s ongoing asbestos awareness campaign in a press release to local media.
“Every week twenty tradesmen die simply because they have breathed in asbestos fibers during the course of their work. The problem today is that we associate it with a problem that’s been and gone because asbestos is now banned. We regard asbestos as something a previous generation was exposed to,” she explains. “There is a real risk that the younger generation entering the workforce today will think this does not apply to them but it does. If they work on any building built or refurbished before the year 2000 it could well contain asbestos.”
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