An International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimate, cited in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine in January 2007, concluded the attributable fraction of occupational cancers in industrialised countries is 13.8 per cent for men and 2.2 per cent for women. ILO’s cautious estimate puts the global human toll at over 600,000 deaths a year – one death every 52 seconds. This would translate to around 10 per cent of all cancer deaths every year. Key paper calculating the global burden of occupational disease in the 2000s using a new work-related cancer concept. Few countries in the world had work-related disease registers so they used Finnish work-related disease attributable fractions to estimate about 2 million global work-related deaths annually. In 2000 occupational cancer was the leading cause of work-related death. The authors call for improved information and prevention. The paper’s cancer incidence estimates are likely to be significant under-estimates, relying in part on papers by Rushton for ILO and McCormack of IARC, both of whom have faced criticism for missing many cancers.

Päivi Hämäläinen, Jukka Takala, Kaija Leena Saarela. Global estimates of fatal work-related diseases, American Journal of Industrial Medicine (AJIM), volume 50, pages 28-41, 2007.