Katie Barnfield

Well, yeah, we were at the hearing where they discussed whether to bring in a ban.

Well, it's a statewide, it's an effective ban because obviously there's a difference between federal law and state law in the US.

And at state level, they can ban the production, the fabrication of these worktops.

And they did start the process towards an emergency ban.

While we were at the hearing, there were probably around 30 or 40 people who were joining either in person or online to give their experiences.

queuing up all to give basically the same story, saying most of them were workers or family members who had lost loved ones to this disease.

They were all saying, we used the safety measures, we used wet cutting, we used ventilation, we used masks, and yet we still got this disease.

So that was really, really interesting to hear, particularly as we've been doing some reporting in

in the uk on this where there is pushback against the ban um the health and safety executive for instance are saying that you know wet cutting is an effective measure to prevent this but that did feel like it contrasted with what we were hearing and just explain to us um katie what is wet cutting is that pouring water over it as you cut it to sort of dampen down the dust

Yes, it is.

There's various measures.

I mean, we actually visited a factory in the north of England in the UK who spent thousands on safety measures, including wet cutting.

And what they have is kind of a hose, like a jet, that pumps water continuously onto the slab and through the cutting tools.

As they're working with it, you can also get things like misting systems, which they were using, which kind of blasts sort of a fine mist around the factory, which is meant to kind of dampen down the dust.

You can also do things like protect the cutting machines, make them robotic, which this factory was doing.

But in California, as I say, both the workers and doctors, actually several doctors stood up to give evidence at the hearing.

They said that, you know, the only effective measure really is a ban.

People can still contract this disease even if they are using measures like wet cutting.

Well, in the UK, it seems like we are at the beginning of a potential outbreak.

We've had around 50 confirmed cases, four deaths so far.