Killer kitchen dust leaves family members with deadly lung disease

Stonemasons who are members of the same family have contracted silicosis from cutting quartz kitchen worktops, MPs have been told.

Dr Jo Feary, the UK’s leading respiratory consultant treating stonemasons battling the incurable lung disease, called for a national screening programme of the workforce to detect cases early and improve survival chances.

More than 50 quartz stonemasons, many in their twenties and thirties, have been diagnosed with silicosis since mid-2023 from cutting the man-made stone, with four known to have died after inhaling its lethal high-silica dust.

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

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A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

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Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

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Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

A roundtable of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Respiratory Health on silicosis heard that there had been a “serial failing” from UK authorities to protect quartz workers. One workplace safety expert claimed some UK stonemasons were being provided with less protection than Roman slaves.

There were calls for the Government to intervene to prevent the global epidemic of cases seen in places such as Spain, California and Australia, with 6,000 cases in 12 countries detected so far.

Dr Feary, who is treating 80 per cent of the UK’s known cases, pointed to screening programmes in New Zealand and Australia – which banned quartz kitchen worktops in 2024 – showing between 12 and 29 per cent of tradespeople had silicosis.

“So, at least 10 per cent of any population of workers where they’ve had screening have got disease,” she said.

“I’ve got absolutely no reason to think that the UK is any different.”

There are fears case numbers in the UK could be far higher than currently known with recent analysis warning more than 1,000 of the roughly 7,000 workers in the industry could have silicosis.

Due to the lack of a national screening programme, Dr Feary’s clinic at the Royal Brompton Hospital, has launched its own self-referral system.

Of the 22 referrals seen at the clinic 78 per cent have been diagnosed with silicosis. .

“These are people who have no access to health surveillance. Their exposure [to dust] is incredibly high.

“They are a completely vulnerable population, and a high proportion of them, I suspect, will die from their disease.”

The youngest patient Dr Feary is treating is 23, one was diagnosed after just a year’s exposure to quartz dust, and 29 per cent were exposed for less than 10 years. Sixty per cent are migrant workers.

“I have families where an uncle comes in with their nephew and both of them have silicosis because they’ve worked together,” said Dr Feary.

“We get phone calls from wives, mums, and grandmas saying ‘I’m worried about my grandson, he’s cutting that stuff’.”

She also called for better financial support for stonemasons forced out of their trade due to their diagnosis.

Workers with silicosis can apply for Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefit (IIDB), but unlike patients with asbestos-related cancers, they aren’t currently fast-tracked for the payments.

Dr Feary said: “I sit with men every week in tears, men in their forties and fifties, who say ‘I don’t know what else to do’ with their partners.

“In the UK, we can offer them nothing bar IIDB, which can take six months to come through if they’re lucky, and pays for their travel to come to see me every six months.”

Last month, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) launched its most significant intervention so far into the engineered stone sector, unveiling its first regulatory guidance warning “dry cutting” without water suppression tools is banned while “wet cutting” was a legal requirement.

As part of the crackdown, it has started a nationwide inspection campaign of 1,000 businesses cutting quartz.

Of 11 businesses inspected so far, four have been issued with prohibition notices ordering them to stop working with engineered stone due to dry cutting.

Kevin Bampton, chief executive of the British Occupational Hygiene Society, said the emergence of silicosis cases among engineered stone workers was “a serial failure of everything”.

Bampton said: “All of these things were foreseeable. In 2020, the amount of engineered stone coming into the UK went up by 70 per cent and the manufacturing base didn’t, and so semi-finished blanks were available.

“It highlights the real weaknesses we have in our system that doctors, GPs don’t get any occupational health training.”

HSE didn’t mention artificial stone in its guidance until May 2024 so “weren’t really looking” at the problem, he added.

“The Romans used to put RPE [respiratory protective equipment] on their slaves, because they didn’t want the cost of losing slaves to respiratory problems,” he said.

“People should not be in business if they cannot look after basic health. I think we have to have a higher intolerance to the idea of businesses who say ‘this is hard for small businesses.'”

He added that if Dr Feary were to leave the NHS “we’ve lost our capability to deal with it in the UK” and questioned why the Department of Health and Social care was not acting with more urgency.

Mike Calcutt, deputy director in HSE’s engagement and policy division, said, the workplace safety watchdog’s immediate priority was preventing exposure to silica dust as quickly as possible, but didn’t rule out a complete ban on quartz.

“We have proved through our research that exposure can be prevented by implementing the measures we’ve got in place.”

“If evidence comes to light that it isn’t or can’t be, then obviously our options remain open.”