This photograph was taken for the British Daily Herald newspaper in ca 1940. Gas masks have also been produced for children. Many of the collectors acquire gas masks for their own use, to wear. Old gas masks are common in museum collections, but they are particularly popular among collectors. The dust filter is said to be made of cellulose and asbestos fibre. For example, Väestönsuojeluopas, a guide published by the Finnish civil defence organisation Suomen Väestönsuojelujärjestö in 1962, features a structural drawing of a gas mask filter. Asbestos can also have been used in filters manufactured in Finland. The phenomenon affects museums, schools, collectors and hobbyists alike. The presence of asbestos is characteristic of the filter layers of old gas masks made not only in Britain, Germany and the Soviet Union, but also in other countries. Asbestos had been found in the particulate filter layers of all filters. The recall was initiated by the Finnish Safety and Chemicals Agency, which had had 12 filters from the 1980s tested by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health. In Finland, the issue of asbestos in gas masks first arose in public in 2017 when the Varusteleka Oy company, among others, had to stop selling filter cartridges for the Soviet GP-5 and PDF-2 gas masks and ask customers to return any cartridges they had bought. Six soldiers demonstrating the use of a gas mask during the First World War. The HSE decided that old untested gas masks should not be handled or worn as teaching aids in schools because visually distinguishing between hazardous and safe filters is difficult or impossible. The results showed that the filters of 29 gas masks contained asbestos, and six filters included blue asbestos, considered the most hazardous for health. In 2014 the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigated 34 old British and German gas masks. Possible risks were not properly addressed until the 2000s. No research-based information is evidently available on the asbestos exposure of contemporary gas mask wearers or current gas mask owners and wearers. Photo: Guarding against the danger of gas. Breathe calmly!” Breathing through a gas mask was hard, which is why it was recommended that people get gradually used to it through various drills. Those exposed to asbestos at work have suffered from, for example, lung cancer, to a far greater degree than other members of the population. However, the focus has been on the workers of factories producing gas masks during the Second World War whose health and causes of death were analysed in the 1970s and 1980s in Britain and Canada, for instance. The connection between the filter cartridges of old gas masks and asbestos has long been known around the world. In this blog post, we explain how we investigated the matter and what we eventually found out. In spring 2020 we decided to find out whether these suspicions were true. However, we had to scrap these plans at the last minute when we discovered that the filters of old gas masks may contain asbestos. In 2015 we made plans to place one of the civilian gas masks on display in the University Museum’s new main exhibition, The Power of Thought. The collections also include an equine gas mask dating back to the 1930s or 1940s which is of an unknown origin. The University Museum has received the masks from hospitals and University of Helsinki departments. The collections of the Helsinki University Museum include eight gas masks, of which seven are from the 1930s and intended for the civilian population. The gas mask originally belonged to the University of Helsinki Department of Pharmacology. A civil defence gas mask from the late 1930s included in the collections of the Helsinki University Museum.

Soviet gas mask