ASBESTOS is the biggest killer industrial disease in Britain. It has the highest rate of mesothelioma deaths in the world. Over 5,000 are killed by asbestos disease every year — equivalent to one Grenfell-sized death toll every five days.

It is incurable. It is a terrible death. A death by slow suffocation due to an ever-increasing shortness of breath. Most victims die within 12 months. Some can linger for longer, just prolonging absolute misery and agony. It normally has a long latency period of between 30 to 50 years. Children are more susceptible than adults.

It was stunning to see on the front page of the Daily Mail (October 21) the headline “‘Tsunami’ of Asbestos Deaths in Schools” and the subheading, “Hundreds of thousands of former pupils and teachers could die, claims shock new report.”

That new report, What Is The Real Risk Of Asbestos In Schools, is damning new research by Dr Gill Reed, which shows that as our school stock ages and crumbles, the death toll is set to get even worse.

Award-winning freelance investigative journalist Steve Boggan also wrote the Mail’s inside spread. It said, “Chillingly, a study conducted by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1980 found that for every teacher who died from mesothelioma, nine students were likely to die in the following decades.

“But this figure could be higher because a later inquiry, in 2013 … found that children were more vulnerable than adults and that a child exposed at the age of five was five times more likely to develop mesothelioma than an adult exposed at 30.

Boggan’s own personal and individual stories are mixed in with rock-solid investigatory statistical research from Dr Reed. Picking up from his article, the Daily Mirror quotes from Reed’s report:

“Crucially, the evidence in this report suggests that [asbestos] is likely to be a tsunami in Britain. Their deaths would be the consequence of ineffective asbestos regulations and a cost-cutting culture that wrongly implies ‘asbestos is safe so long as it is not disturbed’.”

The Daily Mail might seem an unlikely vehicle to be campaigning on this, but asbestos is an indiscriminate killer. It is a humanitarian issue. That they receive this death sentence for being in school is an outrage.

Schools are not industries, but they are churning out an industrial-sized flow of killer mesothelioma victims.

Many victims die in old age. Only those under 75 are counted in government statistics as potentially being exposed at school. Why? It can only be because the government is trying to minimise the numbers being killed by exposure to asbestos in schools.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has previously claimed that the number of asbestos-related deaths would start to decline after 2021. However, it is, as Reed’s evidence in her document shows, going to increase greatly (available at https://bit.ly/NEUasbestos).

Mesothelioma mortality rates have increased by 887 per cent since the early 1970s, according to Cancer Research UK, the world’s largest independent cancer research charity. It is like a picture of Dante’s Inferno.

This government has allocated no large-scale funding for asbestos removal in schools, not even for those in the most dangerous conditions.

Astonishingly, the HSE prediction for a fall in mesothelioma deaths is completely wrong. These facts have been recognised by the joint education unions issuing the statement below in response to the Daily Mail revelation:

“As education unions, we wish to see a strategy for making our schools and colleges safer from the dangers of asbestos, and we call for the implementation outlined in the select committee on work and pensions report: for a national risk register detailing the location and condition of asbestos in all public buildings, and a 40-year timeline for its removal.

“We know that 8 out of 10 schools contain asbestos materials, and note the rising number of education workers among those being diagnosed with asbestos-related cancers. The current policy of ‘safe in situ’ asbestos management is not sustainable: we want it removed safely, professionally, as soon as practicable.”

Knowledge of asbestos as a killer goes back to the Roman times. Pliny the Elder (AD 24-79) wrote that those working in asbestos mines were more prone to “lung sickness.” He recommended quarry slaves from asbestos mines should not be purchased because of their high incidence of early death.

Dangers have been reiterated innumerable times since then. In Britain, imported since the 1870s, asbestos was extensively used in areas of industry like shipbuilding and public and private buildings.

The history of this was scrupulously recorded in Alan Dalton’s book Asbestos Killer Dust, published in 1979. This landed him in court when he was sued for libel by Dr Robert Murray OBE, criticised in the book for his pro-industry views and advocacy of asbestos “safe use.”

Dalton lost, and Murray was awarded £500. Murray’s £30,000 legal bill, however, left Dalton and Hazards Bulletin bankrupt. Everything he wrote has since been proven to be true.

Boggan’s shock exposé provides us with a potpourri of facts, figures and accounts warning of an asbestos pandemic. Comparing deaths: those killed in Britain by the coronavirus are estimated to be 232,112. Those killed by asbestos is estimated to be 500,000 between 1978 and 2018 by Dalton.

The difference is that asbestos, as a grim reaper, is by no means largely behind us and, as Reed’s brilliant research uncovers, is set to rise.

In conclusion, let us celebrate the pioneering authors, individual campaigners, legal firms and pressure groups, plus a few MPs. Boggan’s work is up there with the best of them. He has previously written about the dangers of asbestos for the Sunday Times, who are also conducting a campaign.

Let us fight together in unity to ensure that we can finally get rid of the dreadful scourge killing our teachers, support staff and pupils in education. In uniting, we are many; they are few. Disunity will be the death of us.

Hank Roberts is Joint Unions Asbestos Committee campaigns adviser, he writes here in a personal capacity.