Helen Bone was diagnosed with an asbestos-related cancer in 2021. She was 38. The type of cancer, mesothelioma, is incurable; the best prognosis is a few years, though most people don’t get that long. “You always think of asbestos as a disease from decades ago – affecting men who worked in heavy industry – so to be diagnosed in my 30s is shocking,” she told the Northern Echo in 2022. “I want to see my children grow up but now I have to come to terms with the thought that this might not happen.” Sadly, Bone passed away in November last year, just three years after her diagnosis.
For most people, the word “asbestos” will evoke previous eras: dusty Victorian and Edwardian factories; the shipyards of the interwar period; postwar building sites. Yet asbestos was not banned in the UK until 1999. According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), it still kills around 5,000 people every year. Many anti-asbestos campaigners believe that this figure is a serious underestimate, and that the real total is closer to 20,000. Mesothelioma has a long latency period: anything from 15 to 40 years. Helen Bone could have been exposed to asbestos at school, at the college where she studied to become a critical care practitioner, or at the two hospitals where she later worked.
