Stone employee with terminal silicosis blames quartz worktops

Marek Marzec, a forty eight-year-veteran father of three before all the pieces put from Poland nevertheless residing in London, has labored for quite lots of engineered stone producers in north London and Hertfordshire since 2012. He used to be identified with silicosis in April this year. Since then, his condition has hastily deteriorated and he has been told by scientific doctors he has easiest weeks to live.

Marzec is being handled at Whittington Smartly being facility in London and is additionally below the care of occupational lung illness educated Dr Jo Feary from the Royal Brompton Smartly being facility. His silicosis is now at an evolved stage and, having change into too unwell to endure a doubtlessly life-saving lung transplant, he’s now receiving cease-of-life care.

Marzec is taking honest circulate in opposition to his historical employers and is represented by law firm Leigh Day. The firm says that it has a growing series of customers who are stone workers identified with silicosis after manufacturing engineered stone kitchen worktops.

The cutting and grinding processes to get quartz worktops releases silica mud that is at likelihood of be inhaled if appropriate safety measures are now not in express. Sone of Leigh Day’s customers contain described working in mud-stuffed rooms with no dwelling windows and no efficient extraction instruments or respirators.

Talking from health center, Marek Marzec talked about: “I arrived in the UK hoping to construct a bigger life and desirous to guarantee that that my younger daughters had been financially proper. Instead, thanks to the work I did cutting quartz worktops, I no doubt contain been left unable to breathe and in awful distress. I will now not thunder you the device angry I am that I was allowed to work in these prerequisites and that my life has been lower short merely for doing my job. I am now not the ideal person whose life has been set apart at likelihood by this lethal mud. It is time for pressing circulate to cease these unhealthy working prerequisites I had to face sooner than other stone workers contract this awful illness and die.”

His solicitor, Leigh Day accomplice Ewan Tant, talked about: “Here is a tragic case, with my client now on cease-of-life care because working with engineered stone, in what he alleges had been appalling prerequisites, fully unfit for reason. No-one could well maybe merely silent cease up going by device of the bleakest of outcomes merely because going to work. We’re deeply eager that, unless one thing is executed to address the dangers of working with engineered stone with out honest protection, we could well maybe merely be having a watch at more cases with equally appalling – and doubtlessly fatal – outcomes in the approach future.”

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