Watching someone die before your very eyes because of the negligence of their employer, and seeing this person in constant severe pain, is a very hard to deal with picture.
The last whish of these people is that their families will be taken care of after they pass away, and that their family and their colleagues will never suffer because of asbestos exposure.
Every one that has worked with asbestos lies in fear that one morning they will experience the symptoms associated with asbestosis or mesothelioma cancer. The most common medical disorder resulted from asbestos exposure are pleural plaques. The pleura is the sack surrounding the lungs and which allows these to expand and contract normally. The plaques are basically scars produced by the tiny asbestos fibers on the surface of the pleura. These scars provide with the best evidence of asbestos exposure in a person.
The largest problem is that you have very high chances of developing mesothelioma cancer if these plaques have already appeared, making mesothelioma the third fastest spreading cancer in the United Kingdom.
In October of 2007, after a period in which asbestos and mesothelioma victims were entitled by law to claim compensation, the House of Lords have passed a bill that says the contrary. It was clear that the winners were the insurance companies, and the losers were the people exposed to asbestos in a wrongful way.
Being a very compassionate man towards the suffering of others and a lawyer, I attended a discussion with Government to overturn the House of Lords decision. I was very confident in a positive outcome of this. Even so, the following statements of Jack Straw, the Secretary of State for Justice left me with a bitter feeling towards all this.
Other than the funding for further mesothelioma researches, the government has not announced anything else. This left thousands waiting and hoping for the government to allow them to claim compensation. From a moral point of view, I believe that any one of us has the right to work and be unharmed during this whole time. The five Law Lords have confirmed that the claimants are indeed victims of their employers, but even so, they will not allow them to file claims and receive what is morally theirs.
I strongly believe that this should change very soon, towards the morality of things.