Hello and thanks for your post

Many people worry about similar situations when they think they may have been exposed to asbestos. Although some artex may have asbestos, you won't know whether your old house had it. 

Asbestos is still a very common substance and most people are exposed to a very small amount of asbestos fibres in their lives and yet asbestos related diseases are rare. So if you can, try not to be overly worried. It is regular occupational exposure to asbestos over many years that is known to increase the risk of lung disease and cancer, often two or three decades later.

It's worth bearing in mind that practically everyone is exposed to asbestos and that low levels are present in our environment as it can be found in air and soil and yet very few people become ill. 

According to the Health and Safety Executive (which is really about health and safety at work), short term exposures with asbestos will most likely have led to minimal exposure to fibres and is very unlikely to have any long-term ill health effects. You can read more about this by clicking here.

You can read more about this on the British Lung Cancer Foundation website at this link.

Easier said than done but try not to overly worry about this and remember you can always ring your GP if you are still concerned.

Best wishes,

Celene

Hello Chris and thanks for getting back to us.

Please do read over my colleague Celene's reply again. Being exposed to asbestos over a short period of time is unlikely to cause any long time effects including cancer. Mesothelioma is an uncommon cancer. Also what you cleared up did not necessarily contain asbestos. Remember that renovating a house is a very common thing to do and I think it is a fair thing to say that it is not a risk to cause cancer. 

Remember, that it is really only people that work in industries in the past that have been exposed to asbestos over a long time that are at risk.

I hope this help you worry less. If it is not and you are still worried then please do talk with your GP. 

Take care,

Caroline

Thank you. Your reply was very helpful and reassuring. I got the date wrong - my house was built in 1989 when artex with asbestos was, I believe, commonly used so a good chance it was present. Saying that, I imagine that even with all the scraping by the contractor that may have released the white fibres this is still not classed as a harmful level compared to an industrial worker. It's just hard to get information on the web! Chris

I have had very similar worries about artex in my home. I installed a cooker extractor about 6 years ago and drilled through artex. It was then boxed in and I didn’t think much else about it until our first child was born last year. To date I have had 19 asbestos samples taken in my house which were all negative, these even included swabbing random dust. I haven’t built up the courage to take down the cooker hood and test that directly so I went looking for some data to see how risky artex is.

In around 2006 the HSE reclassified textured coatings (artex) removal as non-licensed work. This meant that anyone who following the available guidance could do the work without a special license. Before this re-classification they gathered a lot of information on the release of asbestos fibres from artex to see if the reclassification would lead to increased deaths. I have found the following document they produced at the time:

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/5383577/report-number-ifs-05-13-airborne-fibre-concentration-hse

They looked at the fibre release concentrations for different activies working on artex. These are measured in fibres per ml of air. They measured both personal monitors and static monitoring points in a room. For example they found that rubbing artex with a  wirebrush for 15 minutes gave a personal reading of 0.02 fibres per ml or 20,000 fibres per cubic metre of air. In the UK it has been suggested that outdoor air has as many as 100 fibres per cubic metre of air. For more context it has been shown that cutting asbestos insulating board (AIB) can generate 5 to 20 f/ml which is 5 to 20 million fibres per cubic metre of air, and this would be the more dangerous amosite asbestos. 

The report has some interesting risk statiatics including:

If someone was removing artex with a scraper for 37 hours per week for 5 years with no respiratory protection the risk of death would be 0.67 in a million. 

driving a motorbike for 6 miles has a 1 in a million chance of death (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort)

they also looked at a long term risk to a million children living in houses after artex removal from the age of birth to 5 years 24 hours a day and concluded 2 deaths may occur but caveated this by saying this was based on some worst case scenarios so that was an over estimate.

they also concluded that the number of predicted deaths of asbestos workers in the next 50 years from removing artex, with or without a mask, was less than 1.

None of this is to say that its perfectly safe to remove artex but it gives an indication of the long term risks from exposure to it during work.

I found this very useful in putting things into perspective, I hope others will to.

Thank you for your post, I too had a similar oversight regarding Artex,  I read the document in question and it indeed has helped to put things in perspective. That said it’s 2:25 in the morning and I’m still wide awake worrying about everything and nothing. Any further words of reassurance would be appreciated!