The Health & Safety Executive has launched new web pages dealing with industrial diseases. One has information about silica dust (click here to visit it).

Silica, or respirable crystalline silica (RCS) to give it its full name, is estimated to kill around 600 people a year from lung cancer, 75% of them from the construction industry, even though many of them have retired by the time the disease kills them.

It is why the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) cares so much about the dust levels in stone processing workshops, in particular where granite, engineered quartz and sandstone are being processed. Even when water-cooled machines are used, the dust is carried in particles of water that remain suspended in the air for a long time.

The particles that cause the demage are around five microns – too small to see. But if the air feels damp in a machine shop, or is dusty in a workshop, the harmful silica dust will be present. It will be deposited in lungs and start to cause cancer. It can take many years for the disease to develop, but when it does it is fatal, slowly killing victims by making it impossible to breath.

Find out how to avoid it by downloading the pamphlets available on the HSE website.