The long goodbye - women and asbestos

Although - rightly - the website has concentrated on the deadly impacts of asbestos on miners and men working with the material, slowly we're being told of women who - though not working directly with asbesots - are also dying. This is such a story of two women. Cape plc, the company for whom the women worked was subject to workers-led litigation three years ago, for its asbestos mining in South Africa.

The long goodbye

Sally Williams reports on the women who have suffered painfully lingering deaths from cancer - and all because they washed the asbestos off their husband's overalls

October 18, 2004

The Guardian

Yvonne Power, 49, has always hated housework, and this probably helped save her life. While her older sister, Evelyn, was helping scrub her father's overalls, Yvonne was turning handstands in the garden, or playing with the toy wooden roundabout her father had made for her.

Her father, John, was good with his hands. For 25 years, from the early 60s, he was a foreman at Cape, in Cowley, Oxford. His job was to cut asbestos boards for ceiling panels. He died of mesothelioma, the asbestos-related cancer, 11 years ago, at the age of 67. Evelyn died of mesothelioma in 1996, aged 45, and her mother, Barbara Fitt died of mesothelioma, aged 71, last month.

Experts believe that mother and daughter contracted the disease from washing John's overalls, an innocent enough activity, you would think, but not when they are covered in tiny asbestos particles. Barbara thought she was doing nothing more serious than the weekend wash. But those days at the old Belfast sink were the beginning of the end. "I remember dad coming home and his hair was quite white," says Yvonne, "but he didn't have grey hair, he had dark." She can also remember him leaning over the kitchen sink, bare-backed, while her mother carefully picked out asbestos fibres with a pair of needle-tip tweezers.

Yvonne worked at Cape in the 70s as a secretary, and would visit her father. "Saws were going all the time with clouds of dust billowing up."

There were no showers or areas for the men to change. Instead, they would bring the near-invisible needle-like fibres home. Now their wives and daughters are dying horrible deaths as a result. "These were men just trying to earn a living," says Yvonne, "just trying to look after their families."

Asbestos is a naturally occurring mineral and was used extensively for about 150 years as a fireproofing and insulating material, until the dangers were made public in the mid-60s. There are three severe asbestos related diseases: asbestosis - a scarring of the lung tissue; lung cancer; and mesothelioma, a cancerous tumour that encases the lining of the lungs, growing like a vice. It is a very painful death, like a slow suffocation.

Like asbestosis, mesothelioma has a long latency period, developing anything from 15-60 years after the dust is inhaled. But there are significant differences. Most people do not die from asbestosis. Mesothelioma, on the other hand, is always fatal. Asbestosis never occurs in members of the public who haven't worked with asbestos. Mesothelioma, by contrast, does. It may occur after only very brief exposure. So working with asbestos won't necessarily kill you, but washing it off a pair of trousers can.

"Why some people contract mesothelioma and others asbestosis or lung cancer is thought to be down to genetic disposition," explains Dr Chris Warburton, consultant respiratory physician at the Aintree Chest Centre in Liverpool. Around 1,800 people die each year from mesothelioma and domestic exposure cases account for around 5% of these deaths. And cases of mesothelioma are increasing. Chest physicians in Sheffield, for example, expected to see half a dozen cases a year in 1990; now it is more like one a week.

"I worry about mesothelioma because there seems to be no threshold," admits Adrian Budgen, a partner of the law firm Irwin Mitchell, and head of its national asbestos team. "The extent of secondary exposure has clearly taken the insurance industry and some doctors by surprise. Now, we are seeing more unusual cases and that is a real cause for concern."

I visited Barbara Fitt in June, three month before her death. "Everything has changed," she told me, from the sofa where she sat, propped up by cushions - fragile and focused on breathing: get air in, get it out again; get it in, get it out again. She lived with her daughter Yvonne, and Yvonne's husband, who is self-employed, and their three children, in Camberley.

She had been diagnosed with mesothelioma the summer before. She used to like ballroom dancing, crosswords, women's magazines and knitting - cable, Fair Isle, socks, jumpers, she could knit anything. Take a Break and My Weekly magazines sat unread by her bedside as the morphine made it difficult for her to concentrate. She had, however, taught her granddaughters to knit. "They have had to learn fast," she said. She was stoical and resigned. "Nothing can change anything," she said, before hunching up to get a drink from the kitchen.

It was an agonising walk, both painfully close and infinitely distant. She felt hot, she said, because of the asbestos. It felt as if your insides were burning. She knew it was only going to get worse, from her experience of nursing both Evelyn and John. "I think that is what makes it so awful. I know what is in front of me. It's not like being run over by a bus, or dying of lung cancer. I know everything. It's not nice."

"People are usually absolutely shell-shocked, blown away by the diagnosis," says Liz Darlison, who runs the National Mesothelioma Information Centre in Leicester - a new initiative set up in response to the growing number of sufferers. "Typically, patients have never heard of the disease, let alone know how they got it. And if exposure was in the home, there can be a lot of guilt."

Of course, the real culprits are the companies who put profit before safety; or at least failed to provide showers. The last few months of John, Evelyn, and Barbara's lives were spent fighting a difficult battle for compensation from Cape. They eventually won. "But," Barbara told me, "you ask my grandchildren what they'd prefer. Me every time."

Damages typically range from £40-60,000. These claims are never easy, says Sally Moore, a partner at Leigh Day and Co, not least because, these businesses, like spam fritters and black and white TVs, are part of our past. But being a woman at home makes it even harder. "Because the wife was not employed by the company, you are generally looking for the public liability insurer, rather than the employer liability insurer," explains Moore. "That is a significant difference, because public liability is not compulsory and never has been."

Contracting an industrial disease at home also means you need to prove exposure. You need a witness - the husband, say, who brought the dust home. If you no longer have a husband, then you don't have a claim, unless you can find other witnesses.

Jennifer Pascott, 67, was diagnosed with mesothelioma in January. When I talked to her at home in June, three months before she died, I was painfully aware of a bowl of syringes and a bottle of morphine sulphate sitting alongside the dish of china sweets on the glass coffee table in the sitting room of her immaculate Sheffield bungalow.

She hadn't seen her husband, Jo, for 30 years when she was diagnosed. He worked at British Furnaces, Chesterfield, lining furnaces with asbestos, in the late 60s. Their son, Adam, was born in 1971. Jo walked out four years later. The separation was acrimonious. Jennifer got a job in a car show room, then worked as an estate agent. She sang in the church choir, walked and cooked. Her husband, like the Ali Baba laundry basket in which she kept his clay-covered work trousers, was history. Then the breathlessness and back pain started.

"It's Jo, here, how are you feeling?" was the telephone call that broke the 30-year silence, after Helen Ashton, Jennifer's lawyer from Irwin Mitchell, tracked him down a few months ago. He lived barely 10 minutes away and, luckily, was happy to help. "He has not been to see me," Jennifer told me. "He would probably like to, but I can't stand any hassle at the moment." In the past few months, Adam, who works for the Norwich Union, has found a father and lost a mother.

Women like Jennifer have another disadvantage. If you contract the disease at home, you are not entitled to the same disability benefit as those who were exposed at work. This can amount to around £120 a week. Nor do these women qualify for a pneumonicosis benefit scheme, set up by the government in the late 70s for people with long latency illnesses who are not able to bring claims because their employers have gone out of business. This can be a lump sum of around £40,000.

Clearly, this extra money can make a difference. A chairlift, says Christine, whose mother Teresa Maguire died of mesothelioma in May, would have transformed the last few months. In March, Teresa was awarded £82,000 compensation in a landmark judgment against Harland and Wolff, that pushed back the date at which companies should have known about the dangers of asbestos, from 1965 to 1960. The company contested and is still fighting the award; Teresa died before any money was paid.

She contracted the disease four years ago, aged 64, as a result of washing the work clothes of her husband Jimmy, a boilermaker in Liverpool docks. She met Jimmy in a dance hall. They married, aged 25, around the time he started working for Harland and Wolff's shipyard. They moved to a former council house in Liverpool, with dahlias and marigolds lining the garden path, around 21 years ago.

"We had such plans," says Jimmy, who retired in 2001. "Days out. Walking. We had our passes, we could go anywhere." Instead, Jimmy nursed his wife, carrying her up and down stairs and into the bath. When this became too painful for her, he slept by her side on a camp bed in the sitting room. "She loved her bedroom," says Jimmy. She would have liked to have spent her last days in it. "But Tess didn't like to make a fuss."

Jimmy makes a painful face and looks away. He swallows hard and clears his throat. "She never complained." She didn't know about asbestos, adds Christine, "My mum was just doing her job as a wife."

· National Mesothelioma Information Centre freephone helpline: 0800 169 2409 (open Monday/Wednesday/Thursday from 9am-4pm).