The recent report of a teacher dying of meso is again tragic.
Apparently 140 teachers have died in the last 10 years due to asbestos exposure.
I would never have thought this occupation a high asbestos exposure risk. However it has been reported that about 75 % of UK schools contain it.
There was an out of court settlement to the widow.
One of the central issues in the case related to whether the shelves in a cupboard which Mr Beck regularly used to store books and equipment were made from asbestos material. It was reported that former colleagues were able to describe them and stated they were removed during an asbestos removal project at the school in the 1980s.
Hence does anyone know was the removal badly executed?

The quality of the removal is perhaps incidental to the potential exposure (most of which would be directly to the breathing zone) arising from fibre release caused by placing and removing books on a daily basis - if the reported nature of the shelves is factual.
A task incidentally that pupils were often asked to assist with.

Not so long ago, many teachers (usually the best ones, in my experience) came to teaching having already gained a wide and worldly experience from another career. Many teachers may have had significant exposure in that other career, the disease manifesting many years later.

Back in the day at school we used to have:-
our Bunsen burners on asbestos plates, do experiments with arsenic and used to roll mercury around in our hands , as for when i worked in the dockyards that would shock, asbestos stripping with no ppe whatsoever and it was fibre lagging etc etc -how times have changed but some are paying for those times

When I joined Liverpool Fire Brigade in the 1960's we had asbestos hoods and gloves on the appliances.

This was PPE to wear when dealing with incidents involving acetylene cylinders.

We would wear the hoods during drills and exercises, how much closer to inhaling fibres can you get?

We fought fires in asbestos cement prefabs without wearing BA, that was poo poo'd at the time as we were all very macho.

The crews at the Airport had full suits made from asbestos to wear when fighting aircraft fires.

We would carry out searching exercise inside the tunnels beneath stations where pipes were lagged with asbestos, occasionally we would not use BA but would wear blindfolds.

Happy days then all right.

A not so happy thought is very recently a retired Liverpool firefighter has died and his widow successfully sued his former employer for exposure to asbestos causing his death.