More than one in five workers across Europe are exposed to causing substances at work, a study found. The European Union’s CAREX project assessed occupational carcinogen exposures from 1990 to 1993 by member state across the European Union. It found: “About 32 million workers (23 per cent of those employed) in the EU were exposed to agents covered by CAREX. At least 22 million workers were exposed to IARC group 1 carcinogens.” These are substances known to cause cancer in humans. The figures for Great Britain were broadly in line with the EU average. Above 5 million workers were estimated to be to be exposed to cancer causing substances, affecting 22 per cent of the workforce. Top exposures in Great Britain (based on workers exposed at least 75 per cent of the time) were tobacco smoke and solar radiation, followed by crystalline silica and radon, diesel engine exhaust, wood dust, benzene, ethylene dibromide, lead and inorganic lead compounds, glasswool and chromium VI compounds. Asbestos is excluded from the analysis. The paper noted: “According to the preliminary estimates, there were circa 5 million workers (22 per cent of the employed) exposed to the agents covered by CAREX in Great Britain in 1990-93. The number of exposures was circa 7 million”. Other recent studies have suggested the at-risk group may in fact be increasing. Even by the CAREX estimate, over a fifth of the UK workforce has been exposed to possible human carcinogens and for these workers most of the resultant cancers will only emerge in a couple of decades or more.

Timo Kauppinen and others. Occupational exposure to carcinogens in the European Union, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, volume 57, pages 10-18, January 2000.