The day Chris Georgiou was diagnosed with mesothelioma, he was both shocked and confused.

For one, he had no idea what the word meant.

“I got the shock of my life. Mesothelioma? Never heard of it,” Mr Georgiou tells Neos Kosmos.

“I even asked the doctor to write it down for me, I never knew it was about asbestos.”

For 14 years, Mr Georgiou was in direct contact with asbestos and the synonymous product Mr Fluffy.

As a jeweller, he would store some of his precious materials in the roof cavity of his house, touching the asbestos with his bare hands.

“The ceiling was asbestos, and I was putting pink bats up there, aluminium foil to warm up the house, touching the asbestos,” he says.

Now at 80 years old, his recent diagnosis is a testament to how dormant and deadly mesothelioma can be.

“I was pretty healthy, mind you, but only now it’s come up in my body.”

Mr Georgiou is suing the federal government in the New South Wales Dust Diseases Tribunal for negligence after it failed to stop the installation of Mr Fluffy in homes when it knew full well of the dangers of asbestos.

His lawyer Theodora Ahilas, a seasoned asbestos litigator, says documents show that the government was aware of the harm coming into contact with asbestos could cause.

“We believe he’s got an arguable case because the Commonwealth knew about the dangers,” she says.

“There was a document in 1968, commissioned by the then federal government through an agency to identify whether there were any dangers associated with Mr Fluffy, the document indicated there was a danger to employees [installing the insulation] and also to people in the homes.

“So knowledge was around about the dangers of asbestos.”

In the document, the government was even briefed that it should consider stopping the operator of Mr Fluffy, Dirk Jansen, from operating.

When Mr Fluffy was installed in Mr Georgiou’s house in the mid 1970s, even more knowledge was known about the dangers of asbestos.

For Mr Georgiou, mesothelioma has caused him a number of problems, including fluid in the lungs, severe chest pain, nausea and weight loss.

While his condition is stable for now, he lives in fear that the preventable disease will resurface.

“It takes a long time to surface in your body,” he says.

“It’s a secretive disease, that’s always there.”

He fears that his son, who helped him install pink bats in the roof years ago, will end up developing the disease.

If successful, this case will open the door for other people affected by asbestos in their homes to come forward.

With the nature of mesothelioma lying dormant for years, the threat of developing the disease is always apparent.

More than 1,000 homes in the ACT were fitted with Mr Fluffy asbestos in the ’60s and ’70s. Homeowners living in the affected houses were recently sent a letter by the ACT government outlining the threat.

The federal government has agreed to help the ACT government fund a buyback and demolish program for affected homeowners, a clean-up program that could cost upwards of $1 billion.

For Mr Georgiou, bringing the issue of the ‘silent disease’ to the fore and ‘exposing’ the government’s inaction is enough to give him the strength to keep the fight alive.

Ms Ahilas says sufferers need to see action.

“I’ve been doing this work for 23 years and I can tell you about what I’ve seen, about families that have been destroyed by this disease,” she says.

“They absolutely deserve to be compensated for the pain and suffering caused by a preventable disease.”

Australia has the highest incident rate of asbestos-related disease in the world.