UK asbestos maker withheld information on material’s risks, court papers show
One of the UK’s biggest manufacturers of asbestos and the industry bodies that it co-founded historically withheld information on risks posed by the carcinogenic material, playing down the dangers while lobbying the government for product warnings to be tempered, according to documents released after a lengthy court battle.
A lawyer who acted for the Asbestos Victims Support Groups Forum UK in its fight to obtain the documents about Cape compared its behaviour to the tobacco industry’s former refusal to admit evidence of harms from smoking while its own research showed the opposite.
Despite all types of asbestos being banned in the UK since 1999, it still kills thousands of people every year.
According to the court documents, a partner company of Cape’s was considering a warning label on asbestos products in 1958, but Cape advised it that “a caution label on our products and none on [our competitors] would make our selling efforts most difficult”.
They also state that in 1969, Cape’s group medical adviser accepted in a document that the fatal cancer mesothelioma could be caused by “short and possibly small” exposure and that “no type of asbestos proved innocent”. In the same year, a research review by the Asbestos Research Council (ARC), of which Cape was a founding member, accepted the link between asbestos and mesothelioma, stating: “Elimination of the dust hazard is therefore the only answer.”
Nevertheless, when Cape began to label its product in 1976 with a “take care with Asbestos” warning, it said “breathing asbestos dust can damage health”, but made no reference to the risk of mesothelioma, the documents show.
Additionally, from 1966, the ARC successfully lobbied the government for regulation of asbestos products to be
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