A South Korean court has ruled that exposure to carcinogens at a Samsung semiconductor factory caused a worker’s ovarian cancer. The Seoul Administrative Court said it saw a “significant causal relationship” between the disease and even a low level of toxic chemicals because the worker Lee Eun-joo was exposed to carcinogens over a long period.

Media reports note that Lee died in 2012 after battling ovarian cancer for more than a decade. She worked at a Samsung chip factory for six years from 1993, starting when she was 17-years-old. The court said the glues that Lee used to put a silicon wafer on a lead frame contained formaldehyde, a top rated group 1 International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) carcinogen, and phenol, a known promotor of tumours, according to its material safety data sheets.

The court also implicated night shifts and the factory’s ventilation system. It ordered the government compensation agency to compensate her family. The court also said the agency should be less stringent in deciding eligibility for compensation when the cause of the disease is not completely clear cut.

In 2004, another solvent used in the semiconductor industry, ethylene glycol methyl ether (EGME), was linked to an increased ovarian and breast cancer risk in women on hormone treatments.

Unions are to work throughout the Dutch Presidency of the European Union to develop a preventive approach to occupational cancer. During this presidency, which runs from January to June, the Dutch government has expressed a desire to update the EU Carcinogens and Mutagens Directive, a longstanding union objective.

A new report from the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) says the union objective is to “eliminate occupational cancer.” Promoting a six-point preventive charter, it urges unions to run a political and awareness campaign. This should include approaching embassies and consulates of the Netherlands to present the union campaign objectives, it notes.

The ETUC report notes: “At workplaces trade unions are demanding that dangerous substances and processes are eliminated or substituted with less dangerous ones. Likewise we are seeking to improve work organisation in order to avoid or minimise exposures to night and shift work. To reinforce this work we are calling for improvements to the legislative framework at EU level and we are seizing the opportunity created by the initiative of the Dutch Presidency.”

• Why we need to focus on work-related cancer, ETUC, January 2016.

A Canadian union leader has called for a national registry of the location of asbestos materials. The call from Philip Venoit, president of Vancouver Island Building and Construction Trades Council, came after latest figures from Statistics Canada revealed new cases of the asbestos cancer mesothelioma had doubled across the country, from 276 cases in 1992 to 560 cases in 2012.

Venoit has written to the Prime Minister’s Office and to several provincial premiers and mayors across the country. He has had no response from the PMO or from premiers, but says several mayors have expressed support. He called on federal, provincial and municipal governments to develop a national registry of all public buildings and vessels, such as navy ships, “and to make that registry online and available to all restoration and construction workers.”

He added the registry should identify the types of asbestos products in the buildings – such as floor tiles, ceiling tiles, insulation, drywall and pipe cladding – and provide instructions on how best to remove that material. “The baby boomer generation is well versed in asbestos,” he states in his letter, but warned: “We are on the eve of mass retirement with a new generation of workers who know very little of the harmful effects asbestos exposure can cause.”

Venoit urged the government to develop a national apprenticeship programme to ensure young workers know how to safely work with asbestos, and said the federal government should ban imports of asbestos.

The call for an asbestos ban was echoed by human rights campaigner Kathleen Ruff, a high profile critic of Canada’s long-time role promoting asbestos use worldwide. Writing in the RightOnCanada blog, she noted:” The new Canadian Liberal government has said that it will uphold scientific evidence and the public interest. To date, Canadian government policy on asbestos has been set by the asbestos industry, not science.

“It is time for the Trudeau government to end the decades-long complicity between the asbestos industry and the Canadian government. It is time that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Health Minister Jane Philpott show the kind of leadership that Canadians hoped for in electing them.”

Ruff added: “Health experts and civil society organisations in Canada and around the world have asked Prime Minister Trudeau and Health Minister Philpott to respect science, protect health and ban asbestos so that no more Canadians die needlessly and to show the world that Canada’s historic role of leading global promoter of the asbestos industry has finally ended.”

Two of five workers who developed bladder cancer while working at a chemical factory manufacturing dyes and pigments are demanding that the Japanese government recognise their illness as job-related.

Speaking to reporters in Tokyo, the pair called on their employer – Tokyo-based Mitsuboshi Chemical – to make urgent improvements in conditions at the plant in Fukui Prefecture. Employees Kenji Takayama and Yasuhiro Tanaka, both 56, have each worked at the plant for nearly 20 years. They say poor working conditions, including a lack of ventilation that routinely makes workers sick, could have caused the cancer.

The five who contracted bladder cancer were involved in mixing or drying aromatic amines, including the potent bladder carcinogen o-toluidine. One of the cancer sufferers has retired, but the four others remain with the company.

The health ministry is now looking into the possible association between the workers’ cancer and the factory environment, while Mitsuboshi Chemical has not commented on a possible link.

Hiroyuki Isobe, executive chair of the Kansai chapter of the Kagaku Ippan Rodo Kumiai Rengo,the union that represents the workers, said the union had just visited the Tokyo head office of Mitsuboshi Chemical.The company avoided comment on whether their contact with the chemicals was responsible for the cancers, Isobe said.

The case parallels that at a US Goodyear plant in Niagara Falls, where over 60 workers exposed to o-toluidine are reported to have developed bladder cancer.

In his award-winning 2008  book, Doubt is their product: How industry’s assault on science threatens your health, occupational health academic Dr David Michaels – now the head of US government safety regulator OSHA – notes the chemical industry led by DuPont conspired to cover up the cancer risks posed by o-toluidine (OT).

Writing in Hazards magazine in 2008, he notes: “Through a series of DuPont letters, reports and papers, the book demonstrates that DuPont managers witnessed this development and growth of this tragic epidemic, yet refused to acknowledge that OT could also cause bladder cancer, shipping the chemical out without proper warnings. As a result, dozens of workers exposed to OT in a plant in Niagara Falls, New York, USA, have developed bladder cancer.

“For many years, DuPont and other manufacturers have disputed the link between OT and human bladder cancer. Earlier this year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer evaluated OT and reached the same conclusion I did, too late for the Niagara Falls workers: OT is a human bladder carcinogen.”

In Tokyo, history could be repeating itself.

Workers set to lose their jobs at a General Electric plant in the US fear serious diseases linked to their exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) could hit them later in life.

The union representing the workers at the GE Fort Edward plant is citing concerns over exposure to toxic PCBs – used in manufacture of capacitors at the plant – in pressing the company to pay for health testing after workers lose their jobs.

But the Albany Times Union reports the company, which is closing the plant, is refusing the request. A high-ranking GE executive also told the union there is “no credible evidence” that PCBs cause cancer or other serious illness, a stance that puts the company at odds with federal and international health agencies that for years have labelled the chemical as a likely human carcinogen.

Gene Elk, an official with the electrical union UE, said that workers are concerned potential exposure to PCBs could put them at risk of illness later in life. The union wants access to company-collected health records of workers at both Fort Edward and a second Hudson Falls plant.

National health and safety regulator OSHA this month cited GE for safety violations at the Fort Edward plant and issued $53,000 in fines. One fine was because federal inspectors found “employees’ working surfaces were not kept clean from PCB contamination” during a 5 August 2015 inspection, according to the citation. GE has until 8 February to either accept or contest the fines.

A greater emphasis on prevention of cancers would reap considerable benefits, the director of the UN’s cancer agency has said.

Christopher Wild, who heads the International Agency for Research on Cancer, said figures vary, “but one can safely estimate that 40 to 50 per cent of cancers could be prevented if the accumulated knowledge about causes could be translated into effective primary prevention.”

Writing a wide-ranging article in the journal Health Management, he said it was a “pivotal time for cancer prevention”, noting: “Prevention and early detection demonstrably work… Estimates of the costs of implementing cancer prevention strategies are difficult to make on a global scale, but are certainly a fraction of the costs of dealing with the consequences of the occurrence of these same cancers.”

Wild added: “Despite proof and promise, prevention remains too often neglected. Prevention typically attracts less than 5 per cent of cancer research funding with vastly greater proportions invested in basic science and clinical translational research.”

Highlighting tobacco usage as the “pre-eminent culprit”, he noted: “Alcohol, excess sunlight, unhealthy diets, environmental contaminants and occupational exposures all contribute.”

The IARC head is critical of the tendency to focus on “individual choices, whereas legislation and policy may be keys to success, offering a sustainable approach and one which contributes to reduced inequalities in society.”

Wild reiterates a theme from a July 2015 article where he wrote the “the necessity of prevention is blindingly obvious.” In Adjacent Government, he also noted: “Improved protection against workplace carcinogens form part of the successes.”

There are concerns IARC may not have fully absorbed its own prevention message. The majority of cancer causes identified in IARC monographs are industrial chemicals or other work-related occupational and environmental exposures.

However, IARC’s own prevention guides are skewed towards lifestyle interventions, with none advocating a reduction in workplace or environmental exposures to carcinogens. The UN agency has also been accused  of damaging its reputation through collaboration with the asbestos industry.

A major study published in Nature in December 2015 concluded workplace, environmental and other ‘extrinsic’ exposures are the cause of up to 90 per cent of cancers.

• Christopher Wild. Precision in the fight against the global cancer problem, Health Management, volume 15, issue 4, 2015.

Executives at the world’s biggest asbestos factory spied on journalists and  safety and environmental campaigners who exposed the killer dust’s dangers.

Secret industry documents seen by The Independent newspaper reveal that the executives at Rochdale-based asbestos giant Turner and Newall (T&N) monitored people they considered to be “subversive” and kept a dossier on their activities at the height of the debate about the mineral’s safety in the 1980s.

Those identified in the report include the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS) – the organisation that set up what became Hazards magazine – Alan Dalton, the now deceased former union national safety officer and author of ‘Asbestos Killer Dust’, journalists working on an award-winning asbestos documentary and Friends of the Earth.

Also targeted was Nancy Tait, the founder of the world’s first asbestos victims’ advocacy group, an asbestos widow who died in 2009. The firm then used a media and political campaign in an attempt to discredit its critics.

The T&N documentation was unearthed from the company’s archives by Manchester Metropolitan University researcher Jason Addy as part of 12 years of research into the firm’s toxic legacy. He said: “My research findings give me great cause for concern.” The trained lawyer called for “an investigation into Turner and Newall’s role in undermining the democratic process.”

Despite being a major player in global chemicals production, the UK is showing little interest in efforts to control the most dangerous substances including carcinogens, a new report suggests.

The report from the European Environment Bureau (EEB), argues that unless the EU chemicals regulation REACH “is better enforced, it will never achieve its aim of removing harmful chemicals from the market”. A Roadmap to Revitalise REACH notes “most Member States, including several with a strong chemicals industry, such as Italy or Ireland, are not contributing at all to the process, while others, like the UK and Spain, are only contributing marginally.”

The report reveals the UK government has only proposed two Substances of Very High Concern (SVHC), chemicals including carcinogens and reproductive toxins targeted for phase-out. It notes even Norway, not an EU Member State, has proposed more (6), while France (17) and Germany (44) top the table.

Dr Michael Warhurst, executive director of CHEM Trust, a UK-based charity that promotes safer alternatives to hazardous chemicals, said: “We are very concerned about the performance of the UK government, who seem to have a deliberate strategy of not identifying the chemicals of very high concern. Do we really think it is OK to leave this job to other countries, when UK citizens and wildlife are just as exposed to these hazardous substances?”

CHEM Trust is critical of the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) approach to the identification and control of the “worst chemicals”. It points to an online HSE strategy document that states there must be “an overriding UK government policy need for the UK to take the initiative on a substance”.

CHEM Trust says “this shows a worrying lack of commitment to human health and the environment.”

• A Roadmap to Revitalise REACH, EEB, December 2015.
• Health and Safety Executive online document on ‘Selecting substances to propose for authorisation, restriction, evaluation or harmonised classification and labelling’.
• ECHA SVHC webpages.

Electronics companies are starting to respond to pressure to reduce their use of chemicals that are known to be hazardous to human health, the environment or both.

The industry’s slow steps away from damaging chemicals follows increasing recognition that electronics manufacture is causing cancer and other serious health effects in exposed production workers all the way along the supply chain. And the harmful impact goes further, with much of the discarded electronic waste illegally exported for typically hazardous recycling or disposal.

In an indepth feature published on the environmental news website Ensia, journalist Rachel Cernansky notes that to eliminate certain chemicals, electronics companies need to know if and where they’re using them in the first place. But modern supply chains have become so long and complex that many electronics companies don’t actually know which substances are in all the parts they use in their products.

High profile campaigns have put the electronics industry’s health and safety abuses, cancer clusters and pollution in the public eye. They have also been a driver of improvements in both knowledge about what is used in manufacturing products and recognition of the case for using safer alternatives.

“If you solve a problem at the upstream stage – if it’s designed in a proper way, if the hazardous components are replaced by less or non-hazardous ones – the problem downstream will be less,” said Tadesse Amera, a steering committee member of IPEN, a global network focused on safer use of chemicals. She told Cernansky: “We are not talking about waste. We are talking about the whole process.”

Joel Tickner, director of the Green Chemistry & Commerce Council, a project based at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said: “There’s been a lot of writing about toxicity in the electronics supply chain. I think what’s new is global collaboration, stronger focus on purchasing, collaboration among electronics companies really starting to dig into their supply chains.”

Cernansky reports that Ted Smith, coordinator of the International Campaign for Responsible Technology, has been talking with major companies such as Apple and Seagate to increase their access to such information. Seagate, he says, has come a long way. “They’ve been able to get all their suppliers to disclose all of their chemicals, and they’ve got thousands of suppliers around the world. It’s not an insignificant task,” Smith told her.

Tools like Substitution Support Portal and GreenScreen for Safer Chemicals increasingly provide practical advice on the move from hazardous to less hazardous substances and processes.

Workplace, environmental and other ‘extrinsic’ exposures are the cause of up to 90 per cent of cancers, researchers have concluded.

The study by a team at Stony Brook University in the US was prompted by a heavily criticised paper in the journal Science which in January 2015 claimed ‘bad luck’ was behind most cancers.

The new research  “found quantitative evidence proving that extrinsic risk factors, such as environmental exposures and behaviours weigh heavily on the development of a vast majority (approximately 70 to 90 per cent) of cancers.”

Song Wu, lead author of the paper and assistant professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Stony Brook University, said; “Many scientists argued against the ‘bad luck’ or ‘random mutation’ theory of cancer but provided no alternative analysis to quantify the contribution of external risk factors.” He added: “Our paper provides an alternative analysis by applying four distinct analytic approaches.”

The finding, published online in the journal Nature on 16 December 2015, concluded cancers are overwhelmingly the result of external risk factors and not bad luck.

The authors used four separate research techniques, employing both data- and model-driven quantitative analyses to reach their conclusion. These analyses discovered “collectively and individually that most cancers are attributed largely to external risk factors, with only 10-to-30 per cent attributed to random mutations, or intrinsic factors.”

Co-author Professor Yusuf Hannun, director of Stony Brook University Cancer Center, concluded that their overall approach “provides a new framework to quantify the lifetime cancer risks from both intrinsic and extrinsic factors, which will have important consequences for strategising cancer prevention, research and public health.”

• Song Wo, Scott Powers, Wei Zhu and Yusuf A Hannun. Substantial contribution of extrinsic risk factors to cancer development, Nature, published online 16 December 2015.