Cancer survival rates in the UK are trailing behind much of the continent and in some cases struggling to stay ahead of eastern European countries despite significantly more funding. A damning online editorial published alongside the findings in the Lancet Oncology medical journal suggests the cancer plans introduced in England in 2000 and Scotland in 2001 are not working and that remedying the problem would take a fundamental overhaul of NHS services.
The families of 10 former workers at a Canadian smelter and who killed by occupational cancers are eligible for compensation, the body responsible for payouts has ruled. The Quebec workplace accident commission determined the workers in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean, Quebec, Alcan smelter were exposed to dangerous levels of carcinogens which ultimately led to cancer.
On the recommendation of the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council (IIAC), the UK government accepted that cancer of the nasopharynx be prescribed for occupations involving the processing, manufacture or repair of wood or wooden goods, for a period of at least 10 years in aggregate.
On the recommendation of the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council (IIAC), the UK government accepted that cancer of the nasopharynx be prescribed for occupations involving the processing, manufacture or repair of wood or wooden goods, for a period of at least 10 years in aggregate.
The European trade union organisation ETUI has published an excellent online occupational cancer resource. It says it is safe to say that cancer is now the main cause of ‘death by working conditions’ in Europe, adding this cancer epidemic is part of a major health and safety challenge facing workers.
The US government’s workplace safety watchdog wrongfully withheld data documenting years of toxic exposures to workers and its own inspectors, according to a federal court ruling. As a result, the world’s largest compendium of measurements of occupational exposures to toxic substances – more than 2 million analyses conducted during some 75,000 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) workplace inspections since 1979 – should now be available to researchers and policymakers. The 29 June 2007 federal court ruling came in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Dr Adam Finkel, a former chief regulator and regional administrator at OSHA from 1995-2003, and now a professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and a visiting professor at Princeton University. His career at OSHA came to an end after disclosing OSHA’s secret decision in 2002 not to offer medical testing to its own inspectors who had been exposed to beryllium dust.
Occupational cancers are killing more people that published official estimates, new figures show. Research commissioned by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and presented to an HSE-organised seminar last month concluded six cancers alone were responsible for 7,380 deaths a year. HSE’s current estimate for all occupational cancers, published on its website, is 23 per cent lower, putting the figure for all workplace cancers at just 6,000 deaths a year.
Reports have confirmed HSE’s estimates of occupational cancer risks fall way short. Hazards says the watchdog should get its act together before another working generation pays with their lives. According to Hazards: “Victims, meanwhile, continue to lose out – missed by prevention efforts and missed by the compensation system. Even HSE’s current estimate says 310 males die each year from occupational bladder cancer, whereas each year only about 20 workers receive DWP industrial injuries benefit for the condition. At least 95 per cent of all asbestos related lung cancers go uncompensated under this scheme.”
Work-related cancers will claim thousands of lives each year for a further working generation as a result of the “shocking complacency” of the government’s health and safety watchdog, a new report is warning. ‘Burying the evidence’ says the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has neither the resources nor the strategy to tackle the workplace carcinogen exposures killing at least 12,000 people each year.
Australian airline Qantas could face tens of millions of dollars in compensation after a dying aircraft maintenance worker was awarded almost Aus$1 million (£0.41m) for lung cancer he contracted after working for the airline. Sheet metal worker Philip Johnson, who worked at the airline’s Sydney Airport base between 1971 and 1991, was diagnosed with lung cancer two years ago, the condition deemed to have been caused by the inhalation of hexavalent chromium, a known cause of occupational cancer.
A continually-updated, annotated bibliography of occupational cancer research produced by Hazards magazine, the Alliance for Cancer Prevention and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
