Joe Duggan

Yeah, it's man-made.

It's a man-made stone.

It has a very high level of silica in it.

Cutting silica

exposes workers who aren't using who aren't being provided with proper safety protection to dust and the higher the silica level the higher the risk to the worker who's cutting it and in case in the case of quartz it can be very high 95 percent silica content whereas granite and marble for example i think the numbers for either are like 30 percent much less

Can I check?

So how we started to get involved in the story was my friend asked me, what's the situation here?

And I really didn't know where to start.

So I just looked up all the top respiratory consultants in the UK who deal with occupational lung disease and just started ringing them up to find out, are there any cases of silicosis here?

from quartz.

And eventually that led me to Dr. Jo Feery, who's a doctor at the Royal Brompton Hospital, who is the main doctor looking after the UK's first quartz silicosis patients.

So she told me in January 2024, yes, we have started to see the first cases.

They've developed in the last few months.

Coincidentally, about a week after she told me that, there was a debate in the House of Lords about this, raised by a Green Party peer called Baroness Bennett.

who's australian and she knew about the ban that just coming in australia and again wanted to know from the government what's the situation here and then government minister said in that debate there are no cases but we we knew that wasn't true it wasn't correct we knew we had a story then and we published the first story i think a week later or so

The main one is, they call it wet cutting, which is using water suppressing tools to stop the dust from developing.

What we found is the profile of the guys who, and it is all men who are getting it,

who are getting silicosis they're working for firms who are just not following these safety rules and just leaving them exposed they tend to say as i say they tend to be very very young um a lot of them are migrant workers who are just being exploited basically

Yeah, the firms that they're working for are just cutting corners and not providing their workers with the correct tools.

It's been difficult to get sort of figures on it, but there's been a bit of analysis done recently.