The Anonymous Widower

Asbestos In M&S Killed My Wife — Gove’s Ruling Is A Disgrace

The title of this post, is the same as that of this article in The Sunday Times.

It is in a section of the paper, which is entitled Act Now In Asbestos, where the paper has a campaign.

These are the first three paragraphs.

Janice Allen met and fell in love with her husband, Stuart, when they worked together at Marks & Spencer’s flagship store in London’s Marble Arch.

The shop would end up killing her.

Janice died of mesothelioma, a cancer she got from exposure to asbestos. The M&S store was constructed using the toxic building material and it was found in several locations where she worked. The department store would award her substantial damages before she died at a hospice in Kent in June 2018.

I have only worked with asbestos once.

This picture shows my father’s printing works in Station Road, Wood Green.

They were not the most salubrious of premises and my father was always making improvements.

My father was a very good practical carpenter and an accomplished painter and decorator.

The back wall of the building was covered on the inside with damp and mould, which even in the 1950s, he thought could be a health hazard, so he decided to do something about it.

• Above a certain height he cleaned the wall and painted it with a standard magnolia paint.
• About two metres above the ground, he fixed a two-by-two batten piece of wood to the wall.
• He also fixed another one to the wall, perhaps halfway up.
• To cover all the damp and mould, he then fixed corrugated asbestos cement sheeting to the two battens with galvanised roofing nails.
• To finish it off he screwed a piece of slatting to the top batten, which he painted a fetching blue colour.

The damp and mould was now out of sight and out of mind.

I remember how this construction was done, as I was my father’s ten-year-old assistant.

Although we’d used asbestos cement sheeting, I don’t think either my father or myself inhaled any asbestos dust, although we weren’t wearing masks, as no-one did in those days.

ICI And Asbestos

My next encounter with asbestos was at ICI in the late 1960s.

• A lot of chemical plants, built before the Second World War were riddled with it.
• But ICI, knew of the problems, and I was given strong warnings about asbestos.
• As I was only putting instruments on plants, with experienced plant fitters, I didn’t have an real encounters with it.

But why if ICI  were so anti, were builders still using it and otherwise sensible companies not removing it from their buildings?

This is the large paragraph in The Times article.

An M&S spokesman said: “Like many older buildings, Marble Arch dates back to the interwar era when asbestos was commonly used in construction, and sadly our former colleague Janice Allen worked in the store over 40 years ago, before the consequences of asbestos use were known. Today we rigorously manage asbestos where it is present and ensure the store is safe for every colleague and customer.”

If ICI were worried about asbestos in the late 1960s, why weren’t Marks & Spencer worried about asbestos in the late 1970s.

A Barn In Suffolk

In the 1980s, I put up a new barn, where we lived.

Often, in those days, asbestos was still used for roofing, but I was recommended to use a new British Steel product, where steel was covered in a coloured weatherproof coating.

I Sneeze A Lot

These days, I sneeze a lot, but I didn’t sneeze this much before I was diagnosed as coeliac and went gluten-free.

Could it be that my immune system is so much stronger and when there is something in the air, it is only giving it a good kicking?

I’ve been sneezing a lot for the past few days, as the Council removed a dead tree from outside my house.

But we do know, that Nottingham University have shown, coeliacs on a gluten-free diet have a 25 % lower cancer rate than the general population.

Could this be due to a stronger immune system?

My Coeliac Son Died From Cancer

I believe my youngest son was an undiagnosed coeliac and he lived the rock-n-roll lifestyle on a diet of ciggies, cannabis and Subways, as he was a sound engineer in the music business. He died virtually out of the blue of pancreatic cancer at just thirty-seven.

So on the one hand being a diagnosed coeliac on a gluten-free diet gives you a certain immunity to cancer and other diseases and on the other hand undiagnosed coeliacs are prey to all the nasties we have to live with.

To return to the tragic story in The Times, which gives Stuart’s age as 62, so that places him as being born around 1960 and his late wife; Janice looks about the same age.

I think it is true to say, that in the 1960s, medicine started to change dramatically.

• Serious heart operations and kidney transplants became commonplace.
• The first heart transplant was performed in 1967.
• Drugs were improving.
• Vaccination was stopping polio and other diseases.
• The first test for coeliac disease in children was developed. Sadly, it wasn’t used on me.

But we had little inkling of the role of genes in diseases.

Incidentally, I didn’t come across my first coeliac, until 1972, when a neighbour had a coeliac baby son called Nicholas.

So was the poor lady in The Times story, in some ways a victim of her time?

• Asbestos was wrongly ignored by Marks & Spencer.
• Medicine hadn’t advanced enough to be able to identify, those susceptible to cancer.
• I have heard so many stories of bad use of asbestos.

Sadly, the dangers of asbestos are still ignored by many companies and organisations today and that includes the NHS.

One of my colleagues at ICI in 1968 will be livid at how we are ignoring asbestos.

Is This A Possible Scenario?

Consider.

• Someone is born coeliac and they are not diagnosed.
• If they were born before 1960, there was no test for coeliac disease in children.
• The simple genetic blood test came in around the turn of the century.
• They work with asbestos in their twenties.
• Their immune system is not good enough to protect them.

Just like my son, will they get a serious cancer?

Coeliac Disease And Covid-19

In Risk Of COVID-19 In Celiac Disease Patients, I look at a pier-reviewed paper from the University of Padua.

This sentence, sums up the study.

In this analysis we report a real life “snapshot” of a cohort of CeD patients during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Italy, all followed in one tertiary centre in a red area of Northern Italy. Our data show, in accordance with Emmi et al., the absolute absence of COVID-19 diagnosis in our population, although 18 subjects experienced flu-like symptoms with only one having undergone naso-pharyngeal swab.

There were 138 coeliac disease subjects in the study and they had been gluten-free for an average of 6.6 years.

The downside of this, is how many undiagnosed coeliacs, suffered a severe dose of Covid-19.

Conclusion

Given the pain coeliac disease has inflicted on my family over the years, I believe that all children should be tested for coeliac disease.

I would also recommend, that anybody thinking of working with asbestos or taking a job with a high cancer risk, should get themselves tested for coeliac disease.

Being found to suffer from  coeliac disease will not in itself kill you, and with the right diet, it might even prolong your life.

July 24, 2023 Posted by AnonW | Health | Asbestos, Cancer, Coeliac/Gluten-Free, COVID-19 And Coeliac Disease, ICI, Marks and Spencer, Mesothelioma, Michael Gove, My Father, Nottingham University, Pancreatic Cancer | 2 Comments