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Tony Bradshaw is 60. Although he is still a few years away from the official male retirement age, he has not worked since he was 47. He was retired on grounds of ill-health from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in 1986, after being told he had cerebellar ataxia (CA). The part of his brain which controls balance, the cerebellum, had been damaged. This explained why Tony staggers, has problems signing his name, and has to get his wife Sheila to tie his shoe laces.

When he was diagnosed, the doctor told him that several things cause cerebellar ataxia. It may be inherited, can be caused by viruses, but could also be the result of exposure to chemicals. Tony remembers, "I was devastated, but I was so upset by my condition that I made no connection between it and my work."

A year afterwards, several chance events made Tony wonder if his ataxia might have been caused by his job. The first was meeting fellow CA sufferers through a self-help group that Tony set up. They held regular meetings, but Tony says he always felt the odd one out. The pattern of his condition just did not match any of the others.

The second event occurred when he and Sheila took a trip to the Cotswolds just before he retired. Tony remembers, "We visited somewhere where railway engines were being renovated, and we saw a big drum that said 'MEK' on the side, and there was a big warning label on it." In all the years that Tony worked with MEK (methyl ethyl ketone) he had never seen such a label. He used MEK, an organic solvent, to clean up the Seacat missiles he worked on, but nobody had ever told him it was a health hazard.

Tony went off to see a local solicitor, when the whole story began to emerge. After a six year battle, supported by his union, the AEEU, Tony accepted an out of court settlement from the MoD of £280,000.

"We only started this as a matter of principle," he says. "People went into the services expecting to be looked after - it was a large employer, not a back street garage that takes short cuts ... Something had happened to us that I did not want to happen to anybody else. I worked all my life and expected to retire in good health at 65. I never expected to come out at 47. You leave home in good health, you go to work, and you expect to come home in good health. What made me angry was that they would let something happen to you along the way."

From what Tony remembered during the six-year case, much had gone wrong along the way which had exposed him to very high levels of MEK. Exposures which, had they been prevented as the law requires, would have meant Tony might now be looking forward to a healthy retirement.

Tony used a rag soaked in MEK to clean parts of the Seacat missiles before he put them back together. "My wife collected old Marvel dried milk cans for me to store the MEK in. It had a vile vapour and we used to mark the tins 'MEK - smelly stuff'."

He was never given gloves or a mask, and doors of the small room he worked in, E302, were supposed to kept shut. "E302 had a fan on the wall which sounded like a helicopter. It was beside the explosive maintenance assistants and was so noisy that it would annoy them and they would turn it off."

Missiles are expensive and dangerous weapons, and the MoD had rules about how many Seacats were allowed in E302 at any time, and also about how many hours a day fitters could work on them. The temperature and humidity in E302 were checked daily, in case they affected the missiles. But when Tony complained about the MEK, he was ignored. "They didn't seem to bother about health and safety, they just wanted to know about production figures," he says.

Looking back on it, Tony says he first noticed something wrong with his health in late 1982. "I began to be aware of difficulties holding a pen and writing, but put this down to getting older and tried to ignore it ... In late 1983, signing for my work became so difficult that I made up my own little rubber stamp to save myself from having to write," he says. He would get work mates to sign any birthday or leaving cards that came round, making excuses that his hands were dirty. "Now that we've had time to look back, all these things finally fall into place," Sheila says.

Finally, when he went to the works doctor about backache, he could no longer pretend that all was well. "I had run out of excuses, I couldn't make any more. I was tired of making excuses," he says. After first accusing Tony of being drunk on duty, the doctor sent him for tests. "Within the week, I was never to work again," Tony says.

There are many things Tony has been unable to do since then. A very inquisitive and practical man, both he and Sheila are proud of how few times they had to rely on someone else to fix the house or the car. "Over my life, I've been to the garage about three times with the car," he says. "I used to do all these things. Most people my age spent their life with 'make do and mend' - if something broke, you would fix it yourself."

He now relies on Sheila, and has even talked her through changing the pump on their central heating system. They laugh when they remember the episode. "There was water everywhere," he says, "but we got there in the end ... if you don't have a little laugh about it, you go under."

Even though Tony and Sheila still laugh, and the compensation has removed some of their worries, Tony says, "No money in the world can make up for me not being able to do my own DIY or get underneath the car. Most of all, I would like my health back."

Solvents at work

Industrial solvents are targeted in phase three of the Health and Safety Executive's Good Health is Good Business campaign. The HSE says about 1400 kilotonnes of solvents were used in the UK during 1995. More than 7 million workers are exposed to industrial solvents, over 2 million of whom are regularly exposed; most of these work for firms employing less than 50 people, those least likely to be aware of COSHH. There are hundreds of different types of solvents, many of which cause ill-health unless exposure is controlled. High-risk industries and processes include chemicals manufacture, printing, paint manufacture, pesticide manufacture, edible oil extraction, pharmaceuticals manufacture, rubber manufacture, painting, dry cleaning, and degreasing. Pressure for substitution of certain organic solvents for environmental reasons is greater than concern for workers' health (Good Health is Good Business: employers' guide, HSE, 1998; Toxic Substances Bulletin, May 1997, 33).

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