Engineer’s asbestos death

THE wife of a former Burnley worker, who died after being exposed to asbestos, is appealing for past workmates to get in touch so she can fight for justice. Mrs Audrey Swales is trying to piece together what happened to her late husband, Deryk, who died last year aged 79.

Mr Swales, of Ravenoak Lane, Worsthorne, died from asbestosis, the lung disease which develops as a result of exposure to asbestos. He had lived for most of his life in Burnley and worked at the English Electrical Company and at hospital sites in the area.

Solicitor Katrina London, of law firm Irwin Mitchell, is representing Mrs Swales. She said: “Audrey believes Deryk was exposed to asbestos during the course of his working life at the English Electrical Company and Burnley hospitals during the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, and we would like to hear from anyone who worked with and knew Deryk Swales at either of these locations.

Carpenters ‘face asbestos death’

One in 17 UK carpenters born in the 1940s will die of the asbestos-related lung cancer mesothelioma, researchers predict.  They also calculated the deadly disease would strike one in 50 plumbers, electricians and decorators and one in 125 other construction workers. The UK mesothelioma death rate is now the highest in the world, with 1,749 deaths in men in 2005.

The study appears in the British Journal of Cancer. The researchers calculated the lifetime risk of the disease among workers exposed to asbestos for more than a decade before the age of 30. Their findings were based on interviews with more than 600 patients with mesothelioma and 1,400 healthy people.

Over all, the projected lifetime risk of fatal meothelioma in all British men born in the 1940s was about one in 170. For every case of mesothelioma, asbestos also causes about one case of lung cancer, so the overall risk of asbestos-related cancer for carpenters born in the 1940s was about one in 10.

The authors also found that around two-thirds of all British men and a quarter of women had worked in jobs involving potential asbestos exposure at some time in their lives. There was also a small increased risk in those who had lived with someone who had been exposed to asbestos.

$2.25 million awarded in asbestos death.

A Buffalo jury has ordered a St. Louis-based supplier of industrial control valves and control systems to pay the estate of a Niagara Falls man $2.25 million for the former Hooker Chemical repairman’s death from cancer, court officials confirmed Wednesday.

Following a six-week trial, the jury held Fisher Controls financially liable for the asbestos-caused mesothelioma that killed Ronald Drabczyk. He died at 70 on Nov. 29, 2005, nine years after his retirement from the Niagara Falls plant.

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