New Health And Safety Executive Figures Released

A leading industrial illness lawyer today (31 October) expressed his disappointment about the number of people still dying because of negligent exposure to asbestos and called for renewed efforts to secure justice for mesothelioma sufferers as new statistics show that the death rate is continuing to rise in both men and women.

The call came from Adrian Budgen, head of asbestos-related disease law at Irwin Mitchell Solicitors, as the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) released the statistics for mesothelioma deaths nationally during 2010.

The latest national figures revealed that 2,347 people died of the fatal asbestos-related cancer in 2010, up from 2,334 for the previous year. They also found more people are being diagnosed through low-level exposure to asbestos and not necessarily from an industrial background.

In Yorkshire, the male death rate per million people was 65.8 deaths from the period from 2008-2010, up from 57.3 ten years ago. Female deaths in the region also rose to 12.4 up from 9.3, ten years previously.

Budgen said: “It is expected that the mesothelioma death rate will continue to rise, peaking in around 2016. Until after this time we will continue to see the devastating effects asbestos has on victims and their families as the number of fatalities continues to rise year on year.

“Irwin Mitchell has handled hundreds of mesothelioma cases and continues to the see the impact of asbestos on people’s lives all over the country. Each year we are seeing an increasing number of women affected by this dreadful disease.

“We are also increasingly seeing people who have not been exposed to asbestos in industrial settings but have had background exposure through schools, hospitals and colleges, making it harder to determine who is responsible for the exposure.

“One of the most upsetting things is that most of the people affected by the condition were negligently exposed to asbestos by employers who knew the risks associated with the material, yet continued to put the lives of their workforce at risk.

“The difficult thing for victims and their families to come to terms with is had adequate protective equipment been provided these deaths could have been prevented.”