Katie Barnfield

But I spoke to a specialist consultant as part of my reporting, Dr Joanna Feary, who works at Royal Brompton Hospital.

She's an occupational health and lung specialist.

And she said that actually the true number is...

probably much, much higher than what we've seen.

As I was just talking about, it can sometimes be years before symptoms appear.

This can be silent for many years.

People don't know that they've got it.

It's not a particularly well-known disease.

It can be misdiagnosed.

So we are at the beginning of an outbreak in the UK.

There has been some conversation around a ban.

We spoke to all of the major trade unions in the UK.

They said that they want to see a ban.

We approached the Health and Safety Executive and also the UK government.

They said that they are not supportive of a ban at the moment.

The Health and Safety Executive did put out an announcement last month, at the beginning of last month, saying that they were introducing new legal guidance, making it clear to fabricators that it's not legal to produce this material, to cut this material without using wet cutting.

And they also said they were going to bring in

an inspection program of around a thousand fabricators and factories over the next couple of months the government also said they were supporting the health and safety executive on this but they said that they weren't um supporting a ban whether that will change as the number of cases grow whether that will change uh when they're looking at things like california who have decided that that this is an emergency issue and that a ban does need to be brought in place um we'll see