This report indicates thousands of occupational cancer deaths each year have been missed in official estimates. The study for HSE, the UK’s official workplace safety enforcement agency, puts the number of cancer deaths in 2005 that were attributable to work at 8,023 – which compares to the 6,000 deaths a year HSE defended as a “best available estimate” until 2008. The new higher figures, which HSE now concedes “are likely to be a conservative estimate of the total attributable burden”, indicate in Great Britain there were 13,694 cancers caused by work in 2005. Hazards subsequently warned “even this figure is conservative for an embarrassment of reasons”, noting: “Filling the gaps in the HSE analysis would quickly push the toll into excess of 10,000 deaths a year and probably well above the minimum 12,000 annual occupational cancer death toll estimated by Hazards in 2005.”

Lesley Rushton and others. Occupation and cancer in Britain, British Journal of Cancer, volume 102, pages 1428–1437, 2010 [abstract]. The burden of occupational cancer in Great Britain, research report 800, HSE, 2010 [pdf].