France’s health and safety agency has decided to ban weedkillers that combine the chemicals glyphosate and tallowamine because of concerns over possible health risks.

Agweek reports the ANSES agency has sent a letter to manufacturers informing them that it intends to withdraw the authorisation for such products, said Francoise Weber, the watchdog’s deputy director-general. “It is not possible to guarantee that compositions containing glyphosate and tallowamine do not entail negative effects on human health,” Weber said.

Glyphosate, a common ingredient in weedkillers such as Monsanto’s Roundup, has been the subject of fierce debate in the past year since a World Health Organisation body classified it as probably carcinogenic to humans, and European Union countries are discussing whether or not to extend its EU-wide licence. France’s environment minister has been pushing for an EU-wide ban on glyphosate-based products.

Earlier in April, global food and farming union IUF and pesticides safety campaign PAN International called for a deluge of messages to be sent to the European Commission and its relevant bodies “urging them to ban glyphosate in the EU and to provide comprehensive support for a safer, saner food system which does not put agricultural workers in the front lines of exposure and inject massive quantities of toxic chemicals into the environment”.

• ANSES’ 9 February 2016 opinion on glyphosate.
• Sign the IUF/PAN letter to Vytenis Andriukaitis, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety; Donald Tusk, President of the European Council; and Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament.

Campaigners have said the European Commission must be stopped from proceeding with the renewed authorisation in the European Union of the toxic herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup and the world’s most widely-used herbicide.

The demand from the global food and farming union IUF and Pesticide Action Network (PAN) International, comes as renewed authorisation is being pushed through despite an International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) warning last year that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic to humans and other evidence of the impact of glyphosate on food and health.

IUF and PAN International are calling for a deluge of messages to be sent to the European Commission and its relevant bodies “urging them to ban glyphosate in the EU and to provide comprehensive support for a safer, saner food system which does not put agricultural workers in the front lines of exposure and inject massive quantities of toxic chemicals into the environment.”

• Sign the IUF/PAN letter to Vytenis Andriukaitis, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety; Donald Tusk, President of the European Council; and Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament.

The US government has gone where the UK had refused to go, introducing new rules to sharply reduce workplace exposures to silica. The 24 March 2016 move by the US Labor Department means the US will halve the occupational exposure standard from the level it currently shares with the UK, 0.1mg/m³, to 0.05mg/m³.

The potentially deadly mineral is encountered in a wide range of jobs from construction, to mining, ceramics, stone masonry, quarrying, brickmaking and fracking. The change will be phased in from June this year, with construction given one year’s grace to meet the requirements and other industries longer.

US officials estimate that the new silica standard, when fully in effect, will save hundreds of lives a year. Exposure to silica is linked to lung cancer, the often fatal lung-scarring condition silicosis and other respiratory, kidney and auto-immune diseases.

US labor secretary Thomas E Perez said he thought that many companies would easily adapt to the new standard because inexpensive equipment is available to control and trap the release of silica dust. US regulators have also argued that a tighter standard will drive improvements in monitoring and control technologies.

“This is no different than the story of asbestos,” the labor secretary said, commenting on decades of delays in introducing the standard. “After 40 years, the political will has finally caught up with the science.”

David Michaels, head of the US government safety regulator OSHA, said: “Every year, many exposed workers not only lose their ability to work, but also to breathe. Today, we are taking action to bring worker protections into the 21st century in ways that are feasible and economical for employers to implement.”

The new standard was welcomed by unions including the national union federation AFL-CIO, the National Coalition on Occupational Safety and Health, the American Public Health Association, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) and Public Citizen.

AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka said: “We applaud the Obama administration for issuing these lifesaving measures,” adding: “The labor movement has fought for these standards for decades. We will continue to fight to defend these rules from the certain industry attacks that will come, so that workers are finally protected from this deadly dust.”

Unions and workplace health campaigners in the UK have pressed the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) to match the US standard, which was finalised pending official ratification in August 2013.

HSE has argued the lower level now being introduced in the US is neither achievable nor practically measurable, issues raised in extensive US government hearings on the draft standard and dismissed comprehensively over two years ago.

• US final silica rule website. Finalised rule on the Federal Register.

A new £5 million centre in the UK is to spearhead research on the deadly asbestos cancer mesothelioma. The initiative was included in Chancellor George Osborne’s March 2016 budget.

The full budget document notes that banking fines would be used to provide funds “to support military charities and other good causes”, including: “National Mesothelioma Centre £5 million – to establish a centre of research in the fight against mesothelioma, which is directly affecting Service Veterans.”

Chris Knighton, 69, who has dedicated her life to campaigning to help those affected by the deadly condition since her husband Mick died from the asbestos-related cancer in 2001, welcomed the move.

Chris, who set up the Mick Knighton Mesothelioma Research Fund, said: “I’m delighted the government has allocated £5m to establish a Mesothelioma Centre for Research. Mesothelioma has been underfunded for decades and its fantastic the government has now recognised it’s one of the most challenging of cancers; as it’s only through high calibre research can we ever improve diagnosis, treatment and care for those affected by this devastating disease.”

Dave Anderson, the Labour MP for Blaydon, said: “This is welcome although I am only giving it two cheers because the funding is one-off and should be annual so that mesothelioma research is put on a par with other comparable cancers. But from acorns come oaks and pressure will continue to do the right thing.”

Initial reports say the national centre is set to be based at Imperial College, London, although asbestos victims’ groups and mesothelioma researchers have called for a more extensive discussion of how the funds are allocated.

Few realise it, but Europe faces over 100,000 occupational cancer deaths a year, the equivalent of a passenger jet crash every day. According to researcher Laurent Vogel: “We can sum up in four words why 100,000 work-related cancer deaths are not a political priority; inequality, visibility, power and freedom.”

Vogel, a top health and safety expert at the European Trade Union Confederation’s research arm, ETUI, said air crashes tend to claim the lives of the likes of shareholders, senior managers and politicians, because “the privileged classes fly much more than the rest of the population… For the 100,000 deaths from occupational cancer, the opposite is true.”

Occupational cancers don’t make headlines, he says, because doctors are quick to ask about a patient’s lifestyle but rarely ask about risk factors at work. Vogel adds “combating occupational cancer requires measures that come into conflict with corporate profits. It is sometimes suggested that the war on cancer could be won by discovering new treatments or perfecting means of early detection. This naive and technocratic vision masks the struggle over public and social control of production choices.”

He says while airline companies have a vested interest in assuring passengers their planes are safe, “by contrast, the organisation of work and the choice of processes and substances are imposed on workers by the company’s management.”

Vogel notes: “There are plenty of reasons to be outraged. But if we want to convert this outrage into action, objectives need to be set.”

He outlines three complementary routes to stopping occupational cancer: Strong legislation; strong inspection; and strong trade union action. He concludes that whether or not the European Commission backs tighter rules on workplace cancer risks “will depend on our capacity to convert cancer into a political priority. With over 100,000 deaths a year, there is an urgent need to mobilise.”

• Laurent Vogel’s editorial will appear in the forthcoming issue of ETUI’s health and safety magazine, Hesamag.

A move to approve the continued use of the toxic herbicide glyphosate in Europe has become the topic of a high profile tussle involving member states, citizens groups, environmental campaigners and unions.

On 8 March, the European Union’s Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed postponed a decision on renewal of the herbicide’s approval when Italy joined France, the Netherlands and Sweden in opposing the move. The case against glyphosate, linked to cancer and other health effects, got a further boost on 22 March, when the European Parliament’s Committee on Environment, Food Safety and Public Health (ENVI) formally objected to the herbicide’s re-authorisation by the European Commission. The postposed vote of the EU standing committee will now take place in May.

Global food and farming union federation IUF is calling for ban on glyphosate. It said “additional pressure is needed to ensure that the European Commission does not cut a deal with the corporate agrochemical giants which would keep Europe locked into the deadly spiral of increasing pesticide applications for another fifteen years.”

In March 2015, the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” It cited evidence in Canada, Sweden and the USA linking workers’ occupational exposure to glyphosate to increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other health effects.

IUF said the alternative to glyphosate isn’t other toxic pesticides like paraquat. It wants resources “made available to promote transition to non-chemical food production which sustains and enriches, rather than destroys, the food system on which we all depend.”

Occupational and environmental health studies with industry funding are more than four times as likely to report negative results, an analysis of hundreds of scientific papers has found.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health also identified a ‘dose-response’ effect, meaning the greater the industry backing the greater the likelihood the study would find nothing to worry about.

Lee Friedman and David Friedman analysed 373 original research articles published in 2012 in 17 peer-reviewed occupational and environmental health journals. They found “a clear relationship between negative results in studies evaluating adverse health outcomes in humans and financial COI [conflicts of interest] arising from relationships with organisations involved in the processing, use, or disposal of industrial and commercial products.”

These studies were 4.31 times as likely to report negative results. Where the backing came from the military, negative results were more than nine times as common. The authors found occupational and environmental health research funded by public agencies didn’t have a bias towards positive results.

The paper, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, notes: “A publication bias can be caused by multiple factors, including inappropriate study design, biased interpretation or presentation of results, legal obstruction preventing an author from publishing results, and failure to report findings that are found to be damaging to the interests of the funding organisation.

“The findings presented in this analysis show a clear association between financial COI and reported findings, and the direction, magnitude, and observed ‘dose-response’ effect of the relationship is consistent with the vast majority of similar studies in other scientific fields (eg. pharmacology, biomedicine, and so on), which demonstrates the need for further research in the field of environmental and occupational health to determine whether this observed association is a product of an underlying publication bias, in particular the omission of studies showing ‘positive’ findings within the public forum.”

• Lee Friedman and Michael Friedman. Financial Conflicts of Interest and Study Results in Environmental and Occupational Health Research, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, volume 58, issue 3, pages 238–247, March 2016 [abstract].

UK-based scientists are playing a prominent role in promoting the continued use of asbestos around the world, according to a new investigative report.

Friendly fibre? notes that while Britain has the highest death rates from asbestos cancers in the world, it is also home to some of the industry’s more turned-to experts. It alleges these have shown a ‘remarkable willingness’ to defend chrysotile, the most common and last remaining form of asbestos in commercial use.

The report, published in the latest edition of Hazards magazine, presents evidence of UK-based scientists authoring scientific papers claiming chrysotile is safe or playing down the risks without declaring their links to the asbestos industry.

Named in the report are Fred Pooley, an emeritus professor at the University of Cardiff, Allen Gibbs, an NHS pathologist from the University of Wales College of Medicine, Ken Donaldson, a particle toxicologist with a long association with the Institute of Occupational Medicine and Royal Society of Chemistry fellow John Hoskins.

Hoskins’ recent activities have also included presentations at International Chrysotile Association (ICA) promotional seminars in India and Vietnam (pictured in a related TV interview, below). Hoskins and Gibbs were also among the authors of ‘Chrysotile revisited’, an ICA-funded defence of chrysotile.

This was used by the industry in its successful campaign to block tighter global rules on chrysotile exports and to defeat planned national bans, including an officially proposed prohibition in Pakistan.

The Hazards report notes: “Supporting those selling chrysotile asbestos in the developing world isn’t a crime. Neither is producing industry-sponsored research to order. Nor is authoring papers that defy the ‘overwhelming’ scientific opinion on a carcinogen like chrysotile. But neglecting to mention those industry affiliations is a big deal. So is producing science that omits inconvenient evidence and that crosses over from plain scientific fact into clear product defence.”

It concludes: “Maybe, just maybe, in the face of what is already the largest industry-created health catastrophe in history, there’s a reason to wonder if this combination of commissions and omissions really does cross the line.”

• Friendly fibre? How the asbestos industry turns to British scientists, Hazards, number 133, March 2016.

Unions are warning that occupational cancer kills 100,000 people every year in the European Union (EU) and are calling for an end to this preventable waste of life.
Europe-wide union federation ETUC says occupational cancer is the most common work-related cause of death, with between 8 and 16 per cent of all cancers in Europe the result of exposures at work.
Criticising the EU’s do-nothing workplace health and safety strategy, Esther Lynch, confederal secretary of the ETUC, said: “Occupational cancer is the ignored epidemic. Workers are dying, literally in the thousands every year, and for 12 long years the EU has done nothing about it. These deaths are the result of preventable workplace exposures.”
She added: “Trade unionists demand binding workplace exposure limits now for these predictable causes of cancer. The Commission needs to stop stalling, delaying until 2020 is irresponsible and unacceptable. The EU should aim for zero workplace cancer. Workers who have been exposed to cancer-causing substances or processes should get regular health checks during and after their employment.”
The ETUC’s list of 50 targeted causes of occupational cancer includes diesel engine exhaust, leather dust, formaldehyde, refractory ceramic fibres, respiratory crystalline silica, cadmium and cadmium compounds, benzo(a)pyrene, chromium VI compounds, ethylene oxide and trichloroethylene.
A new report from ETUC’s research wing, ETUI, identifies more than 70 carcinogenic substances for which it says binding limit values for exposure of workers at the workplace should be set at the EU level.

• Carcinogens that should be subject to binding limits on workers’ exposure, ETUI report no.136, March 2016. Stop cancer at work infographic.

Twenty workers at the Faslane nuclear submarine base in Scotland were exposed to radiation in breach of safety rules, according to an investigation by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

A series of radiation blunders on Trident submarines docked at the Clyde naval port has been revealed in heavily redacted MoD documents obtained by the Nuclear Information Service, a campaign group opposed to nuclear weapons.

Safety procedures were flouted by MoD and contractor Babcock at the Scottish site, the documents show. Breaches included a failure to give visitors radiation badges, a contaminated sponge being taken from a submarine, and another worker being irradiated.

The revelations, which MoD took two years to release, have prompted concern from experts and politicians, who are demanding a major overhaul of safety at Faslane. Prospect, the trade union representing Faslane engineers, promised to support workers worried about radiation poisoning.

The union’s negotiations officer, Richard Hardy, said: “Any incident which involves exposure to radiation is of concern and we will work with Babcock as the employer of our members to ensure that any lessons learned are taken forward as a matter of urgency and also to ensure that staffing and knowledge levels within this critical facility are maintained at the appropriate level.”

Faslane is regulated by an internal MoD watchdog, the Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator. It is not licensed by the government’s Office for Nuclear Regulation, which oversees civil nuclear sites. The MoD said safety at the base was paramount and none of the events described in the reports caused harm to the health of any member of staff or to any member of the public.