UK Predicts Asbestos Related Cancers will Peak in 2015

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January 31, 2008

In early 2007, a prominent medical researcher in the United Kingdom stated that 30,000 Britons had already died from mesothelomia, a lethal cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. Professor Julian Peto, who holds the Cancer Research UK Chair of Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, made this observation in order to supply a context for the following startling observation.

He estimates that about 200,000 additional British citizens could be stricken with mesothelomia due to asbestos exposure in the 1960s and 1970s. He estimates that there will be an additional 90,000 deaths from the disease in the UK. The professor commented that mesothelomia is different from any other industry-related cancer affliction in the world.

The UK’s experience with asbestos-caused disease is a smaller version of what the United States has seen over the last twenty five or thirty years. Estimates of workers that have died from cancer as a result of exposure to asbestos run in the hundreds of thousands. One of the comments made by the British researcher was that the profession most at risk from workers in the mid-Twentieth Century is that of carpentry. Because of the widespread building of that era and the common use of asbestos in all manner of construction materials, his prediction was that as many as one in ten carpenters could fall victim to the disease.

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