One of the United Kingdom’s largest asbestos manufacturers has been found to have withheld detail on the risks the material posed, while also “playing down” the dangers it holds, while also lobbying the UK government to temper product warnings, all of which has been revealed in the documents of a recent court case.
A lawyer for the Asbestos Victims Support Groups Forum said the behaviour was comparable to the tobacco industry’s failure to admit to the harms of smoking despite its own research showing the opposite.
According to court documents, a partner of the company, Cape, considered a warning label on asbestos-containing products in 1958 but the company advised that “a caution label on our products and none on [our competitors] would make our selling efforts most difficult”.
The documents further reveal that in 1969, a medical adviser for Cape accepted that mesothelioma could be caused by “short and possibly small” exposure and that “no type of asbestos proved innocent”. The same year, the link between asbestos and mesothelioma was confirmed by a review by the Asbestos Research Council, which included Cape as a founding member, and who stated that “elimination of the dust hazard is therefore the only answer.”
Cape began to label its products in 1976, with labels that included notes to “take care with asbestos,” which it explained as “breathing asbestos dust can damage health”, but there was no mention of mesothelioma.
The AVSG forum is demanding that Cape apologise for its actions and commit to a £10m donation for mesothelioma research.
The chair of the forum, Joanne Gordon, said: “We believe victims and their families deserve this by way of an apology from Cape for their deliberate deception and shamelessly causing deaths, adding insult by vehemently defending cases.”