The paper reviews the indicators, trends, and recent solutions and strategies to tackle major global and country problems in safety and health at work. It notes that work-related illnesses that have a long latency period and are linked to ageing are clearly on the increase. The report concludes: “Globally 2.3 million deaths take place due to occupational injuries (318,000 deaths) and work-related diseases (2,022,000 deaths) annually. The biggest killers are work-related cancer (32 per cent); work-related circulatory diseases (23 per cent), cardiovascular and stroke; communicable diseases (17 per cent), in particular, in developing countries and farming, and occupational accidents (18 per cent).

Jukka Takala, Päivi Hämäläinen, Kaija Leena Saarela and others. Global Estimates of the Burden of Injury and Illness at Work in 2012, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, volume 11(5), pages 326–337, May 2014.