I was at a course in the HSL building and they have a large poster of an electron micrograph of asbestos fibres with the following words: "Every week, 30 tradesmen die from asbestos related disease. Exposure often came from inadvertent disturbance of asbestos materials in buildings during routine maintenance" Does this meant that in the late 80s and early 90s, young tradesmen were being exposed during building work and they are now dying?

Yes and this will continue until 2020/5 when it should begin to drop off

Though there’s always scope for debate about actual numbers, the overall picture of asbestos-related deaths involving trades people is presumably based on information from various sources including coroners, doctors working with asbestos disease patients, campaign/support groups, trade associations and trades unions. The numbers quoted might be under-estimates because some cases may be masked by other serious medical conditions, especially in older people. Also, in some cases there can be uncertainty as to whether asbestos has actually caused a death or not. An example of this was shown during an episode of the TV documentary series “Death Unexplained” on BBC1 earlier this year. It included a pathologist carrying out a microscopic examination of tissue samples taken as part of a post-mortem investigation from a man believed to have had significant exposure to asbestos during his working life. However, the pathologist could not find a sufficient number/density of asbestos fibres to be able to tell the coroner that death was undoubtedly caused by asbestos. A major problem with asbestos deaths is that they comprise individual cases occurring over time in different parts of the UK and therefore get negligible publicity. If they were to occur at one time and in one place they would receive massive media publicity, just as major disasters with multiple fatalities do, and provoke an understandable public outcry. Sadly however, in most cases, an asbestos death tends to be covered by no more than a brief report in a local paper if a reporter happens to be in court for the inquest. The UK has vast numbers of building, domestic and non-domestic, built or modified before the year 2000 which contain asbestos materials. Therefore, though it is to be hoped that HSE’s “Hidden Killer” campaign will be effective in raising awareness about the risks from such materials, it is probable that significant numbers of trades people will continue to be exposed to asbestos during their work over the coming years.

TFCSM made an interesting point about construction workers coming to the UK from various parts of Europe. As some or many of those parts have buildings with considerable asbestos content, including roof and external wall cladding tiles, it’s quite likely that some workers from those parts will have had significant occupational and/or environmental asbestos exposure before coming to the UK. According to magazine articles I've seen, plus observations during a longish holiday in Eastern Europe in 1994, it seems that asbestos materials were very commonly used for various post-WW2 buildings in countries such as East Germany and Poland during their decades of Communist rule.

I'm a pipe fitter welder by trade and was exposed to ACM's in the 70s and 80s. My last possible exposure was probably around 25 years ago but somewhere in the future, this exposure could come back and bite me. I'm 58 and i know a hell of a lot of ex colleagues, plumbers, electricians, pipe fitters etc who have died from their exposure. I even had an uncle who died from it, 50 years after his last exposure so given industry didnt really get a grip of the problem till the early 90s, and with a possible incubation period of say 40 years, we wont see deaths falling off until at least 2020.