Study highlights asbestos risks

Exposure to asbestos continues to be a major problem in many western countries, killing up to 30,000 people a year. A new study has also shown that one in seven city dwellers show signs of lung damage caused by asbestos.

The new warnings on asbestos came yesterday at the 11th Annual Congress of the European Respiratory Society meeting, underway in Berlin. Lung experts warned that the scourge of asbestos had not gone away despite strict controls on its handling and use.

Exposure levels in the developed world peaked in the 1970s, the conference heard, but it takes years for many asbestos-related cancers to emerge. The annual toll of 30,000 cancer deaths linked to asbestos were recorded in Western Europe, North America, Japan and Australia.

Evidence of the risk comes from a new Belgian study released at the meeting. It detailed results from 160 post-mortems conducted within a random urban population in Brussels between 1998 and 2000.

It found that 14 per cent of individuals tested showed signs of asbestos damage to the lungs. One in five males showed the characteristic damage left in lung tissues by asbestos fibres.

"This means that, at present, almost one person in seven bears the scars of asbestos exposure," according to Dr Krassimir Mitchev of the Erasmus Hospital, in Brussels, who carried out the research.

"The epidemiological outlook is clear," stated Dr Marc Letourneux, from the University Medical Centre Cote de Nacre in Caen, France. "There will be a steady rise in the frequency of asbestos-linked cancers until at least 2010 or 2020, because they take years to manifest themselves." Safety controls had produced a reduction mainly in asbestosis diseases linked to very high exposure levels in workers directly handling asbestos products such as heat insulation and lagging materials. Asbestos is a mineral which has useful heat insulation properties valuable to the construction industry.

It is very persistent and when crushed breaks up into fibres that can be carried on the wind and inhaled. Asbestos risks are low unless the material is disturbed.