Within the medical community, a "high index of suspicion" is needed so that doctors, when encountering patients employed in high risk trades such as builders and plumbers, ask the right questions. Stressing the importance of prevention, Dr. Harling said that the new Control of Asbestos at Work Regulations (2002) imposed a "positive duty" on individuals and companies to manage asbestos safely. Despite the new law, exposures were still occurring and stricter enforcement was needed.
Drawing on four decades of experience with asbestos issues, Dr. Nancy Tait, of the Occupational and Environmental Diseases Association, highlighted recent developments in her talk: Asbestos Issues: The Community:
- while legal aid is still available for clinical negligence cases, it is no longer available for asbestos personal injury cases;
- although the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council reported that lung cancer could occur in the absence of asbestosis in 1982 and 1984, the Government ignored their advice; many medical experts and solicitors "are unwilling to support lung cancer cases;"
- in 1995, the HSE issued warnings on the hazards of asbestos cement; in March, 2003, this material was referred to by the HSE as "normally low risk;"
- government benefits can now be claimed by asbestos patients who experienced low level occupational or environmental exposure but "these benefits are denied to relatives who washed the asbestos workers' clothes, to families who lived in asbestos houses or flats or near asbestos factories or waste dumps, to a wife who cleared-up for a DIY husband and to those with pleural plaques."
Concerned about insurers' attempts to escape asbestos liabilities, solicitors' lack of expertise at inquests and medical appeal tribunals and the disenfranchisement of asbestos claimants, Dr. Tait concluded that much remains to be done.
In the presentation: Mesothelioma: Treatment and Research in the UK, Dr. Ken O'Byrne, Head of the British Mesothelioma Interest Group, said that in the midst of a "national mesothelioma disaster" little funding was available for work on this killer disease: "one hundred thousand people alive in the UK today will die from malignant mesothelioma."
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