The consultant in occupational lung diseases at the Royal Brompton Hospital added: “What’s really striking is it is affecting young people, in their 20s and 30s, and there’s no treatment for it.

“If they didn’t do their job, they wouldn’t have a disease, and it should be preventable. So we need urgent action.”

Dr Feary, who also works as a senior clinical research fellow at Imperial College London, told PA: “We’ve known about the problems associated with artificial stone silicosis from colleagues from around the world for the last few years, but we had not seen any confirmed cases in the UK until the middle of last year when they started arriving in my clinic.”