Nearly two years after losing her son Liam, Nicola Anderson still cannot part with the small traces of his life left at home. His toothbrush remains where it was. So do his shoes.
“I just can’t make myself throw them away,” she says. “Part of me still thinks he’s going to come back through the door.”
Liam was only 20 when he died from mesothelioma, a terminal cancer linked to asbestos exposure.
His symptoms had begun three years earlier, when he was 17: chest pain, difficulty breathing and fluid collecting around his heart. Doctors regard his case as one of the youngest ever recorded.
Mesothelioma has long been associated with older patients, most often people in their 70s and 80s, and ministers maintain that the typical age of diagnosis is continuing to increase.
But specialists working on the front line — including doctors, researchers, nurses and asbestos litigation lawyers — say they are encountering a growing number of patients diagnosed much earlier, in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.
That trend matters because mesothelioma usually takes decades to appear after asbestos exposure, with a latency period commonly ranging from 20 to 60 years, although cases emerging after around ten years have been documented.
For many experts, those timelines point to one worrying possible source of exposure: asbestos in schools.
‘Last week, my staff and I sat down with our list of nine new patients – and while one was in his 80s, the average age of the rest was just 52,’ says Liz Darlison, chief executive of the charity Mesothelioma UK.
Liam Exley with his mother Nicola Anderson. Liam died from mesothelioma at the age of 20
Liam’s primary school was included in a list of 392 containing asbestos that was released in 2016 by Norfolk County Council following Freedom of Information requests
‘We only used to see older people who had worked with asbestos in construction and heavy industry, but now we are seeing more younger patients who have never worked with the material.
‘The only conclusion we’re left with is that they were exposed to asbestos in the atmosphere where they worked, or where they studied when they were very young. And among the youngest, that has to be their schools – most of which contain asbestos.’
Nicola, 49, and her former partner, Tony Exley, 49, can’t point the finger at the nursery or schools Liam attended near his home in Narborough, Norfolk – they simply don’t know where he was exposed.
However, Liam’s primary school was included in a list of 392 containing asbestos that was released in 2016 by Norfolk County Council following Freedom of Information requests. Such lists are released and updated periodically by some local authorities.
Since Nicola spoke for the first time about Liam’s death last month, alarm bells have been ringing among those who work in the mesothelioma field.
Some of the country’s top law firms say they currently have clients in their 20s and 30s whose mesothelioma is thought to have been caused by exposure at school. There are more than 30,000 schools in Britain, and the Department for Education has estimated that more than 75 per cent contain asbestos. Historical Freedom of Information requests have established that the figure rises to more than 80 per cent in England. Freedom of Information requests to NHS trusts have also established that more than 90 per cent of hospitals contain it.
This is thought to be why increasing numbers of teachers, doctors, nurses and ancillary staff are presenting with mesothelioma, according to health and teaching unions.
A 2024 report by the Joint Union Asbestos Committee, which represents eight teaching unions, suggests at least 12,600 former pupils and 1,400 teachers had died from mesothelioma since 1980 – and ‘hundreds of thousands’ more will die in the future.
Statistical research conducted by Dr Robin Howie, former president of the British Occupational Hygiene Society, found that teachers are five times more likely to develop mesothelioma than the general population.
And 2013 research by the Committee on Carcinogenicity, an independent committee that advises the Government on cancer, found that a child exposed to asbestos at age five is five times more likely to develop mesothelioma than someone exposed to it at 30, because such young children have many more years ahead of them to develop the disease.
This is why the Daily Mail’s Asbestos: Britain’s Hidden Killer campaign has been calling on the Government to initiate a phased removal of asbestos from all public buildings, starting with schools and hospitals.
Emily-Jane Scandrett developed her first symptoms of mesothelioma when she was five weeks’ pregnant, at the age of just 39
According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), exposure to asbestos is Britain’s biggest industrial killer, with some 5,000 deaths a year
The policy of successive governments has been to leave asbestos where it is if painted over or boxed away. But we argue that while schools and hospitals have outlived their intended lifespans – and are crumbling – this policy is no longer fit for purpose.
When Liam was first diagnosed, he was studying at college, and later went on to work as an apprentice carpenter.
‘Liam was a keen sportsman and a popular, loving and caring young man,’ says Nicola, who works in a bakery. ‘He’d give his last sweet to you. He was a happy-go-lucky boy, just laughing all the time, and he loved to sing and dance. He was a beautiful boy and we miss him terribly.’
When he developed his first symptoms in 2021, Nicola says doctors at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn diagnosed pericarditis, a swelling of tissue around the heart. They treated him with the anti-inflammatory drug colchicine and drained fluid from his lungs – notably, but unknown to them at the time, one of the symptoms of mesothelioma.
However, his symptoms worsened and, eventually, he was admitted to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, where a neck lymph node biopsy established that he had mesothelioma.
The diagnosis came just four months before he died at home in October 2024. ‘We were shocked – we just couldn’t believe it when they said it was terminal because the previous hospital had never mentioned the word “cancer” or carried out a biopsy,’ says Nicola. ‘We’d never heard of mesothelioma.’
The exact cause of Liam’s symptoms remains a mystery to the family.
Nicola feels the failure to properly diagnose her son for three years deprived him of the chance to receive medication that could have prolonged his life. ‘Liam could have done so much if he’d been diagnosed earlier and been given the proper medication,’ she says.
‘Doctors aren’t looking for mesothelioma in young people, but now they should be. I’d like to see more research into finding a way to diagnose it easier and earlier.’
Mesothelioma is always fatal – but treatments such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy and new drugs being trialled can prolong life in some patients.
Nicola has made a formal complaint to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. (The hospital told Good Health it does not discuss individual patients or their treatment.)
Liam’s death has devastated his mother, father, siblings, family and friends.
While he was ill, always trying to help others, Liam even organised a football match and raised more than £7,000 for Addenbrooke’s Charity Trust. The first charity match was in August 2024. It now takes place each year for Addenbrooke’s and Mesothelioma UK.
His father, Tony, a contract manager in retail refrigeration, says this was typical – Liam was more concerned for others affected by his death than he was for himself.
‘He was the bravest person I have ever known, and he carried on from the day of his diagnosis to try to get as much done as possible and to do as much as he could for everyone else,’ he says.
‘We went to Ascot races a couple of months before he died, and he had a canvas picture made from a photograph of 13 family members and friends. He knew what was going to happen, and he wanted to leave us with that.’
According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), exposure to asbestos is Britain’s biggest industrial killer, with some 5,000 deaths a year.
However, recent research conducted by Daniel Murphy, a professor of lung cancer and mesothelioma at the University of Glasgow, suggests that figure could be as high as 22,500 because thousands of lung cancer deaths are put down to smoking instead of exposure to asbestos.
The HSE says mesothelioma deaths are declining and the average age is getting higher. But it counts only work-related deaths – not exposure among former pupils. And its figures are collated from a person’s last-known job recorded on their death certificate.
Campaigners point out that this excludes many thousands of patients, including women who may once have been teachers or nurses but then left to have children and returned to the workforce years later in other jobs. It is those jobs that are recorded on their death certificate, not their previous role as a teacher or nurse.
Liz Darlison, chief executive of the charity Mesothelioma UK, says that there are increasing numbers of young people with the condition who have never worked with asbestos
Harminder Bains, joint head of asbestos at law firm Leigh Day, has represented more than a dozen headteachers, teachers, and former pupils who developed mesothelioma
‘There is a rising incidence of mesothelioma in teachers, particularly women, that points to the presence of asbestos in schools being a real problem, so I am not surprised that we are seeing younger cases where childhood exposure to asbestos is the only realistic explanation,’ says Professor Murphy.
‘That would point to these patients being exposed at school.
‘My clinical colleagues are also telling me that their patient cohorts are changing, that they are getting younger and that more of them are female.’ In England, 76 per cent of teachers are women. In primary schools, they make up 86 per cent, in secondary schools 65 per cent, and 97 per cent in early years.
Professor Dean Fennell, a consultant in thoracic medical oncology at Leicester Royal Infirmary, is at the forefront of trialling new mesothelioma treatments.
He says he is seeing more people in middle age whose exposure can’t be put down to old-style working practices with asbestos. And he believes asbestos is always the cause.
‘I would once have fallen off my chair if a patient had been in their 40s,’ he says. ‘I no longer do. I have patients, both teachers and former pupils, who account for their exposure being in schools. Children being at risk is a horrendous idea – and that needs to be addressed.’
Emily-Jane Scandrett developed her first symptoms of mesothelioma when she was five weeks’ pregnant, at the age of just 39.
After extensive research by her lawyer – Hayley Hill, a partner at Irwin Mitchell – a former secondary school was identified as the source of her exposure to asbestos. Legal proceedings are ongoing against the school.
Emily-Jane experienced pain on the right side of her ribcage which never went away. She also had pains in her shoulder blade, chest and arm.
‘That started at five weeks into her pregnancy – but every time she complained about it or went to hospital, she was pushed towards the maternity unit because she was pregnant,’ says her husband, Ryan, 39, a production manager at a shopfitting company from Sutton Coldfield.
‘She had many stays in hospital. On one occasion she was in so much pain that she was doubled up on the floor. One doctor said to her, “Get up off the floor. What are you doing down there? If you find pregnancy this bad, maybe you should consider a termination”. We were so angry about that.’
Emily-Jane did not have a termination and it was not until October 2023, nine months after the birth of their son, Tommy, now three-and-a-half, that mesothelioma was diagnosed following investigations into her continuing symptoms.
She was told of the diagnosis alone. Doctors did not wait until her family were visiting, and they broke the news that she was going to die. She died in January this year.
‘She was superhuman to have gone through a pregnancy like that,’ says Ryan. ‘She was an amazing wife, mother, and my best friend, and we miss her so much.’
Irwin Mitchell’s research established that Emily-Jane had spent much of her school years in prefabricated classrooms commonplace from the 1950s. These contained asbestos.
They were removed from her school some time ago – though Ryan says there is no formal record of that removal.
‘Children shouldn’t be in classrooms containing asbestos,’ says Ryan.
‘Governments talk about containing and managing it, but they should be talking about removing it. You can walk into a building and there will be a fire plan on the wall in reception, but there’s no mention of the fact there is asbestos in there. That can’t be right. I know it’s all about money, and the costs will be high, but the Government seems to think that letting parents know that their child’s school is riddled with asbestos would cause panic.
‘But why shouldn’t people know about the kind of environment they are working or studying in?’
A spokesman for the HSE said: ‘Our sympathies are with anyone affected by asbestos-related illness.
‘We have carried out over 1,000 asbestos inspections in schools since 2022. These inspections have shown most schools are managing asbestos safely.’
The experience of lawyers provides a stark bellwether for mesothelioma trends, as each victim is referred to a law firm. All those I contacted reported a change in their clientele.
Adrian Budgen, head of asbestos litigation at Irwin Mitchell, has been representing mesothelioma victims for 40 years and this year was awarded an OBE for his work.
During that time, he’s seen his clients change from people who worked with asbestos to many who never worked with it at all.
‘A couple of decades ago, our clients would be in their late 60s and 70s who had generally been exposed as a result of their jobs,’ he says. ‘We still get clients who came into contact with it at work, but we are getting more people in their 40s and 50s whose exposure is unknown.
‘We’re also seeing quite a few teachers, particularly women, and ancillary workers, and they were exposed at schools.
‘The ticking time bomb could be the children they taught. And we simply don’t know how that will play out in the coming years.’
Richard Green, head of asbestos litigation at law firm Hugh James, says: ‘Over the past 12 months, we have seen a significant and concerning increase in the number of very young people being diagnosed with mesothelioma.
‘During that period, we have been instructed by at least five patients under the age of 50. The youngest was just 29.
‘For a disease which is still widely associated with older people who worked in heavy industry, shipbuilding, construction or other traditionally high-risk occupations, these cases are particularly striking.’
Harminder Bains, joint head of asbestos at law firm Leigh Day, has represented more than a dozen headteachers, teachers, and former pupils who developed mesothelioma from exposure at school. She is currently representing a 21-year-old.
‘I’m seeing more clients in their 40s and 50s, and now some in their 20s and 30s,’ she says.
‘This can only be put down to schools. Increasingly, we’re interviewing clients and they have young children.
‘Unless we face up to this problem, and do something about it, we are going to see many more. I am genuinely scared for the next generation.’
