An investigation of Staffordshire pottery workers found that the industry has a detectable lung cancer risk associated with exposure to crystalline silica. Researchers investigated causes of death among men who had worked in the Staffordshire potteries at some time between 1929 and 1992. They found this group had more lung cancer deaths compared to the national population, or the local male population of Stoke-on-Trent. Lung cancer incidence was associated with particular processes with high levels of exposure to silica. The paper concluded: “The association between risk of lung cancer and quantitative estimates of silica exposure supports the SMR [standardised mortality ratio] analysis and implies that crystalline silica may well be a human carcinogen.” In 1996, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) rated silica as a group 1 human carcinogen. In 2014, HSE was still receiving criticism for its inaction on this occupational cancer risk.

NM Cherry and others. Crystalline silica and risk of lung cancer in the potteries, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, volume 55, pages 779-785, 1998.

UK workers were afforded far worse protection from the highly hazardous and cancer linked solvent methylene chloride (dichloromethane) than their US counterparts. Tighter standard were introduced in the US after a concerted 13-year union campaign. US regulator OSHA introduced a 25 parts per million (ppm) based on the assumption (subsequently proven) that methylene chloride may cause cancer in humans. In January 1998, autoworkers’ union UAW sued OSHA in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, seeking stronger protection for methylene chloride exposed workers. An industry group, the Halogenated Solvents Industry, also sued OSHA, objecting to the cost of the new standard. Soon after the lawsuits were filed, the UAW sought to develop with industry a mutually agreeable standard that would make it possible to end the litigation against OSHA. The resulting settlement was adopted by OSHA. The UK limit at the time was 100ppm, four times higher than the new US standard. HSE in 1998 reviewed its standard, but recommended not only a standstill standard, but a switch from a more binding Maximum Exposure Limit (MEL) to a less strict Occupational Exposure Standard (OES).

HSE’s poor solvent plan, Hazards, number 64, October-December 1998 [not online].

Dichloromethane – Exposure assessment document, EH74/1, HSE, August 1998.

In 1977 Hazards warned that a Derbyshire PVC factory could have put workers at risk of developing cancer at the end of the century. It took local trade union research in 1998 to confirm the factory’s former workforce has been decimated by disease.

Hazards 64, October-December 1998.

Hazards reported that the UK government was in 1998 “edging nervously” towards an asbestos ban. This process was been driven by plans in the European Union to introduce a cross community ban. However, Hazards obtained and publicised evidence showing that the European Commission scientific committee considering the ban proposal had been heavily influenced by a supposedly independent paper that had infact been placed by asbestos industry interests, via Canada’s embassy in Italy. This led to a delay in UK government plans to approve asbestos prohibition regulations. It was 1999 before the European Commission agreed a ban should be implemented EU wide by January 2005. A UK ban took effect in November 1999.

Do or die time for asbestos trade, Hazards, number 62, April-June 1998 [not online].

A report in Hazards magazine claimed industrial chemicals are poorly controlled as a result of inaction or opposition to controls by regulators and industry. The report cites international evidence, and highlights the Prevent Cancer Campaign launched by the Canadian union CAW (now Unifor) in 1997. It quotes CAW’s then national health and safety director Cathy Walker: “We need reductions in the allowable exposure limits which have proven to be so inadequate. We need zero tolerance for exposures to carcinogens. Government must compel industry to replace carcinogens with non-toxic substances by stringent regulations and tough enforcement.” She said chemicals should not be given the benefit of the doubt. “Many questions still have to be answered. But we need not wait until every ‘i’ is dotted to being taking defensive action.”

Industrial genocide: Why industry defends the use of cancer causing chemicals in the workplace, Hazards, number 62, April-June 1998 [not online]. Archive of CAW prevent cancer campaign materials.

High benzene exposures have been found in car mechanics and road tanker drivers. The French study involved measuring levels of the established human carcinogen in the air throughout the working day for both occupations. Tanker drivers experienced the higher exposures, with some concentrations as high as 7.2 parts per million (ppm), higher than the then 5 ppm exposure limit in force in France and the UK (subsequently cut to 1 ppm). Car mechanics faced high exposures when undertaking tasks including dismantling petrol filters and tuning and repairing carburettors. The paper called for “individual and collective safety measures should be imposed in both occupations.” The findings suggest excesses of related cancers like leukaemia might be expected in these occupations after a latency period, with the related cancers emerging sometime around or after 2020.

B Javelaud and others. Benzene exposure in car mechanics and road tanker drivers, International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, volume 71, pages 277-283, 1998.

Avoidable workplace or environmental factors contribute to thousands of cases of breast cancer each year, according to a report in Hazards magazine. Author Andrew Watterson of Stirling University, reviewing the evidence, noted: “If environmental and occupational factors – which employers already have a legal duty to control – contribute even as little as approximately two per cent to the incidence of this disease, to speculate crudely, action against them could reduce mortality by 300 deaths per year. Cutting exposure of the population as a whole to toxic substances and processes would also have an as yet unquantifiable but positive effect on mortality and morbidity of that population.”
Industry and breast cancer, Hazards, number 62, April-June 1998 [not online].

Hazards accused the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) of making “unprovable assumptions” about improved occupational hygiene standards and risks, and about the willingness and capability of firms to recognise and control risks. HSE’s own studies have shown many chemical companies had, at least until the mid- to late-1990s, little or no knowledge of their duties under the chemical control regulations and most were unaware of relevant occupational exposure limits. An August 1997 HSE contract research report found that a quarter of “heavy users” of chemicals and a third of “users” did not have a “reasonable unprompted response when asked what they understood to be the principles of COSHH [the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health regulations].” Over a third of heavy users (35 per cent) and users (38 per cent) were “not aware” of occupational exposure limits, the official standards for the amount of chemicals in the air breathed in by workers. Only a small minority followed the preferred COSHH solution of eliminating exposures or substituting hazardous chemicals. The HSE report found that firms relied heavily on information from suppliers in deciding measures to control exposures. In a critique of the report, Hazards pointed to the example of medium density fibreboard, which contains the human cancer causes wood dust and suspected (now proven) formaldehyde. The regulator has claimed in an October 1997 statement that the softwood dust in MDF was not carcinogenic, at odds with the IARC classification. It described formaldehyde as “an irritant”, when it causes both asthma and was at the time classified by IARC as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” IARC’s next review upgraded this rating for formaldehyde to known human carcinogen.

Industry’s perception and use of occupational exposure limits. HSE Contract research report, CRR 144, HSE, August 1997. Chemicals calamity, Hazards, number 60, Ocdtober-December 1997.

‘Workplace Roulette: Gambling with cancer’ caused a massive political and media stir in Canada. The authors, based at the Occupational Health Centre for Ontario Workers (OHCOW), highlighted the reasons increasing numbers of working people find them exposed to substances, processes and environments that lead to cancer. It also provided practical guidance on prevention, including participatory research.

Matthew Firth, James Brophy and Margaret Keith. Workplace Roulette: Gambling With Cancer, Between the Lines, Revised and expanded edition, October 1997 (originally published January 1996).

Authors affirm that estimating attributable risks from carcinogens is based on “unverified assumptions” in which evidence, some strong and some weak, is treated equally. Effective primary cancer prevention should reduce carcinogen numbers or exposures. Experimental evidence with mechanisms of action and suggestive epidemiology linking cancers and exposures is likely to produce a larger and better list of human carcinogens and target organs.  The paper notes: “Effective primary prevention resulting in a reduction of cancer risk can be obtained by: (i) a reduction in the number of carcinogens to which humans are exposed; or (ii) a reduction of the exposure levels to carcinogens. Exposure levels that could be seen as sufficiently low when based on single agents, may actually not be safe in the context of the many other concomitant carcinogenic and mutagenic exposures.”

L Tomatis, J Huff, I Hertz-Picciotto and others. Avoided and avoidable risks of cancer, Carcinogenesis, number 18, number 1, pages 97–105, 1997.