Silica is one of the slowest, quietest hazards on a building site. A test that reads a worker’s breath is trying to catch it before the damage is done, and this month it moved into its next phase. Here is where it is really up to, and what it means for the way you manage dust today.
Silica does not announce itself. There is no bang, no fall, no incident report on the day it does its harm. A worker cuts, grinds or drills, breathes in dust too fine to see, and years later the scarring shows up on a scan. By then it is permanent.
That lag is the whole problem with silicosis. The disease is doing its work long before anyone can prove it is there. The tests we have traditionally relied on, chest X-rays and CT scans, tend to find it once the damage is already locked in. For a hazard that is completely preventable, that is a frustrating place to be.
So a group of researchers at UNSW Sydney has been working on a different approach: a test that reads a worker’s breath for the earliest chemical signs of the disease, gives a result in minutes, and needs nothing more invasive than breathing into a bag. It is not on your site yet. But from 1 July 2026 it entered its next phase, a multi-year push to prove it works at scale, so it is worth understanding where it is up to. It points at where worker health screening is heading, and the risk it is chasing is still very much live right now.
What is silicosis, and why does it matter to builders?
Silicosis is an incurable lung disease caused by breathing in respirable crystalline silica, the fine dust released when you cut, grind, drill or crush materials that contain silica. That covers a lot of everyday site materials: concrete, bricks, pavers, tiles, mortar, natural stone, and the earth itself during excavation. The dust is around 100 times smaller than a grain of sand, small enough to breathe in without knowing.
Most people came to know silicosis through the engineered stone crisis, which led to a national ban and, from 1 January 2025, a ban on importing engineered stone. But the disease was never confined to stonemasons. Cases are now turning up in tunnelling and general construction. During work on Sydney’s M6 motorway tunnel, 13 workers were diagnosed. In New South Wales, workers are being diagnosed at younger ages, which points to heavy dust exposure rather than a lifetime of slow accumulation.
The ban dealt with one source. The dust on a normal construction site did not go anywhere.
That is the part worth sitting with. Banning engineered stone removed one high-risk product. It did not remove silica from concrete, brick or stone, and it did not change the fact that cutting those materials dry, without controls, is dangerous. For any builder running sites, silica is not a stonemason’s problem. It is a whole-of-site one.
How the test actually works
The UNSW test combines two things. The first is mass spectrometry, a scientific technique that identifies the individual molecules in a sample. The second is artificial intelligence, trained to spot patterns across those molecules.
The idea rests on a simple bit of biology. When silica dust lodges in the lungs, the body responds with inflammation, and that changes the chemistry of what a person breathes out. Human breath already contains thousands of organic molecules. The instrument builds a profile of them, then hands that profile to an algorithm trained to find the specific signature of early silicosis. It is the same pattern-finding used elsewhere on site in estimating tools and job-management software, pointed at a very different problem.
“In human breath, there are thousands of organic molecules that you breathe out,” says Professor William Alexander Donald, the lead researcher from UNSW’s School of Chemistry. “Our instrument can make a profile of someone’s breath, and then we feed that into an artificial intelligence algorithm that’s really good at finding patterns.”
In the study, the test distinguished silicosis patients from healthy individuals with over 90 per cent accuracy, better than traditional lung function testing. The whole process, from breath sample to result, takes less than five minutes per person. It does not require fasting or any special preparation, and it held its accuracy across both smokers and non-smokers. The hardware is a benchtop unit smaller than a cubic metre, which matters if the goal is to put it in a clinic, or eventually on a site, rather than a research lab.
“By combining advanced chemical analysis techniques with AI, it means we can now detect silicosis in minutes rather than waiting for irreversible lung damage to appear on scans,” Professor Donald says.
Where it sits against the tests we use now
To understand why a fast breath test is a big deal, it helps to see what it would sit alongside. Current respiratory surveillance for silica-exposed workers leans on a handful of methods, and each has a weakness when it comes to catching the disease early.
| Method | What it does and where it falls short |
|---|---|
| Symptom and exposure questionnaires | The usual first step. Cheap and quick, but relies on self-reporting and misses early disease that has not produced symptoms yet. |
| Spirometry (lung function test) | Measures how well the lungs move air. Useful for tracking decline, but not specific to silicosis and often normal in early cases. |
| Chest X-ray | The traditional mainstay. Insensitive in early stages, because scarring has to be well advanced before it shows on film. |
| High-resolution CT scan | More sensitive than X-ray and picks up finer detail, but still tends to detect the disease once damage is established. Costly and not suited to routine mass screening. |
| AI breath test (in development) | Analyses molecules in exhaled breath for early disease signals. Fast and non-invasive, but still being validated in larger worker populations before it can be used as a routine screening tool. |
The pattern across that list is clear. The cheap, routine tools are not sensitive to early disease. The sensitive tools are expensive and detect it late. A test that is both early and cheap enough to run at scale would fill a genuine gap.
The honest part: it is not ready yet
This is where the story needs a straight bat, because plenty of coverage has skipped it. The breath test is promising, and it is progressing, but it is not a product you can buy or a service you can book your crew into.
The published results came from a study of 31 silicosis patients and 60 healthy controls. That is a strong early signal, not a finished screening program. The researchers themselves are clear that the test needs validation in much larger and more varied groups of workers before it could be rolled out as routine. Breath samples are currently collected in a clinic and sent to a lab, though the aim is on-site testing down the track.
That validation phase is what began on 1 July 2026. A new 4.5-year grant from the iCare Dust Diseases Board, which funds work on preventing and detecting dust diseases, is backing the team to scale the test up from that small first cohort to a large prospective study. In plain terms, they are moving from a snapshot to a proper long-run trial, aiming to gather as many samples as possible, hopefully thousands, from a dust diseases screening clinic and a private clinic in Sydney. They are also adding blood tests alongside the breath samples to cross-check the biomarkers the breath test is picking up. That is the step that decides whether this becomes a real screening tool or stays an interesting result.
Professor Deborah Yates, the respiratory physician who co-led the work, put the caveat plainly: the research is early and needs further development, but it offers “a breath of hope” for the future. That is the right register for it. Real, but not yet on the truck.
The regulatory backdrop builders are already in
While the test matures, the compliance side of silica is not standing still. Regulators have been steadily tightening the rules around dust, and the direction of travel is only one way. Safe work method statements, air monitoring, on-tool dust extraction and wet-cutting are already expectations, not extras, on work that generates silica dust. In several states, inspectors can issue stop-work notices and on-the-spot fines for uncontrolled dust. It is the same tightening seen across other site hazards, where the threshold for when formal high-risk obligations kick in has been moving in the worker’s favour.
Health monitoring for silica-exposed workers is part of that framework too. A breath test, once validated, would not replace those obligations. It would slot into them, giving employers a faster and less confronting way to keep an eye on worker health than sending people off for scans that only flag trouble once it is serious.
What this means for builders
The breath test is a future tool. The exposure it is chasing is a present one. That gap is the practical takeaway.
The controls that reduce silica risk are the same ones that will still matter whenever a screening test does arrive: cut wet rather than dry, use on-tool dust extraction, fit the right respiratory protection rated P2 or better, keep housekeeping tight so settled dust is not re-released, and treat silica work as high-risk work with the paperwork documented every time. None of that is new. All of it is within your control today.
There is also a workforce point here that fits the longer game. The trades are fighting to attract and keep people. An industry that can credibly say it takes lung health seriously, and that is backing tools to catch harm early rather than mourn it late, is a more attractive place to build a career. The technology is one signal of that shift. The daily habits on site are the proof of it.
So the useful way to read this is not “a cure is coming.” It is that early detection is now being put to a serious test, and the smart move is to make sure the workers who would benefit from it are still healthy enough not to need it. That is decided on site, this week, one cut at a time.
The Good Builder Take
A five-minute breath test that flags silicosis early is genuinely exciting, and it is genuinely not ready. Both things are true, and it does the industry no favours to pretend otherwise. What is ready, right now, is every control that stops the dust reaching a worker’s lungs in the first place.
Read this as a nudge, not a solution. The test says early detection is coming. Your site practices decide whether anyone ends up needing it. Cut wet, extract the dust, wear the right mask, and treat silica work with the same seriousness you would give a fall risk. The technology will catch up. Make sure your crew is still in good shape when it does.
Frequently asked questions
It is a diagnostic tool developed by researchers at UNSW Sydney that analyses a person’s exhaled breath for early chemical signs of silicosis. It combines mass spectrometry with artificial intelligence and returns a result in under five minutes, without the need for scans or invasive procedures.
In the published study, the test distinguished silicosis patients from healthy individuals with more than 90 per cent accuracy, which the researchers describe as better than traditional lung function testing. That result came from an early study and still needs validation in larger groups of workers.
No. The test is still in development. From 1 July 2026 it entered a 4.5-year validation phase, funded by the iCare Dust Diseases Board, to test it on a much larger group of workers. Samples are currently collected in a clinic and analysed in a lab, and on-site testing remains a future goal rather than a current option.
Yes. The engineered stone ban removed one high-risk product, but silica is present in everyday materials such as concrete, brick, stone, tiles and mortar. Cutting, grinding or drilling these dry without controls still generates hazardous dust, which is why cases continue to appear in tunnelling and general construction.
The main controls are wet cutting, on-tool dust extraction, well-fitted respiratory protection rated P2 or better, good housekeeping to stop settled dust being disturbed, and treating silica-generating work as high-risk construction work with a safe work method statement prepared for the specific task.
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This article is intended for general information purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice. Laws, regulations, and industry requirements vary by state and territory and change over time. Builders and trades professionals should seek independent advice relevant to their specific circumstances before making business, legal, or financial decisions.
Last updated: 20 July 2026
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