Think back to your final years at school when you started thinking about what you wanted to do. Maybe you saw a careers advisor to help you weigh the pros and cons of particular job choices. It’s a sure bet they did not tell you that certain careers came with a much higher chance of death due to an asbestos-related disease.
While a select few knew about the dangers of asbestos decades ago, they kept them well hidden. So you cannot blame your careers advisor for not knowing.
Workers in some jobs are more at risk
If you were into DIY, you might have come into contact with asbestos occasionally. Yet many professionals dealt with it daily, unaware of the dangers it presented. For example:
- Firefighting: Saving the lives of others may have shortened your own. Many old buildings contained asbestos which would have been released when the building burned.
- Construction: You may have installed asbestos or removed it. Even if you did not directly handle it, the demolition of existing structures to make way for new ones might have released considerable amounts of asbestos into the air you breathed.
- Shipyards: If a fire spreads on a ship, the consequences will be disastrous. Asbestos is a fire-retardant material, so most old ships had plenty of it.
Even if you feel fine now, consider going to your doctor and asking them to check you for signs of asbestos-related illness if you worked in one of these industries. If they find something, your time left on this earth may be limited, so you need to act fast to discover how to seek compensation.