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A Job to Die For
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Added: 12/20/2005
Type: Summary
Viewed: 511 time(s)
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A Job to Die For
Britain is facing a deadly occupational disease epidemic, according to a new report. ‘A job to die for?’ says whether it is cancer or heart disease, strain injuries or neurological disorders, work is claiming a massive, deadly and largely ignored workplace toll. And it warns if you don’t count the bodies, the bodies don’t count in Britain’s public health prevention priorities.
The report, which appears in the winter edition of the journal Hazards, says official Health and Safety Executive (HSE) figures grossly under-estimate the real incidence of many common workplace diseases and miss entirely many others, leaving hundreds of thousands of serious and sometimes deadly conditions unacknowledged and largely ignored in official prevention strategies.
According to report author Rory O’Neill, an occupational health researcher at Stirling University: “HSE estimates put the number of work-related obstructive lung disease (bronchitis and emphysema) cases a year at under 200,000 cases, but a compensation scheme launched by the government seven years ago picked up almost 250,000 cases in coal miners alone.
“Official estimates for occupational deafness prevalence put the total at under 100,000 cases, but the real figure is likely to exceed 500,000 cases. And in excess of 250,000 people in the UK are likely to suffer from potentially disabling vibration white finger, a condition that fails to register in official statistics at all.”
The report says occupational cancer data are particularly lacking. “Official HSE figures put the annual occupational cancer death toll at about 6,000 deaths, or about 4 per cent of all cases,” says O’Neill. “Unfortunately this estimate is based on old and now utterly discredited data, and the real figure could be up to four times higher.”
The report says ignoring Britain’s occupational health calamity is nothing new. “There are people in their 50s who joined the job market before noise was accepted by the government in 1963 to be a work-related problem,” says report co-author Rory O’Neill.
“Many more, workers in their 40s, started work before vibration white finger was recognised in 1976. In the 1980s it was repetitive strain injuries that got the denial treatment; in the 1990s, stress.
“Some common conditions, like work-related neurological disorders, don’t even appear on the UK work disease scoresheet. Work-related neurological disorders and autoimmune conditions affect thousands but don’t register at all on the official radar.”
Overall, tens of thousands of work-related deaths each year are being wrongly attributed to natural or other causes, says the report.
“The dangerous consequence of this systematic underestimate of the risks posed by work, has been little emphasis on prevention. The result has been tens of thousands of deaths each year which could and should have been prevented.”
The report says the top causes of death in the UK are the most common work-related health conditions - cancer, chronic respiratory disease, and circulatory disease - and the workplace is a substantial contributor to the overall mortality from these conditions.
It calls for an urgent investment in initiatives to prevent occupational ill-health and for the Health and Safety Executive to produce credible estimates of work-related ill-health prevalence.
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