Official occupational cancer complacency revealed

Discounting cancers

In 2005, Hazards accused the Health and Safety Executive of “burying the evidence” of a UK occupational cancer epidemic (Hazards 92). Now new reports have confirmed HSE’s estimates fall way short. Hazards editor Rory O’Neill says the watchdog should act now before another generation pays with their lives.

 

WHAT GORILLA? Painter Pete Farrell reminds HSE it is ignoring obvious cancer risks to groups including painters and firefighters. Demonstrators outside HSE’s June seminar said HSE is downplaying occupational cancer.

Introduction

Research commissioned by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and presented to an HSE-organised seminar in June 2007 concluded six cancers alone – mesothelioma, lung, bladder, nose and naval cavities, non-melanoma skin and leukaemia - are responsible for 7,380 deaths a year, 23 per cent higher than the watchdog’s current 6,000 deaths estimate for all occupational cancers.

Speaking ahead of the seminar, Steve Coldrick, head of HSE’s disease reduction programme, said: “We want to engage with our key stakeholders and industry experts to inform our decisions on future priorities and work streams. The risk of exposure to chemical carcinogens cannot be reduced by the efforts of one organisation or party. We need to rally support from all those with influence in our bid to make workplaces healthier.” The job facing this partnership is looking increasingly daunting. The author of the new estimates, Dr Lesley Rushton of Imperial College London, declined to be interviewed by Hazards. She did however tell the HSE seminar the six cancers total was itself low.

“The researcher stressed that this was likely to be an underestimation as much of the employment data was out of date or unavailable,” said TUC head of safety Hugh Robertson, who attended the seminar. “Further work is still to be undertaken on other cancers, and it is expected that this research will lead to the HSE revising their cancer estimates upwards.” He pointed to a draft Stirling University report, produced for the Cancer Prevention Coalition - an alliance of academics, trades unions and environmental and occupational cancer campaigners - and to be published in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health in October.

This put the number of work-related cancer deaths at more than 12,000 a year, with a financial cost of over £29bn - but warning the true toll could be much higher. Even using HSE’s estimate of 6,000 deaths, occupational cancer carries a price tag of £15bn. Preventing just 100 occupational cancers a year would more than offset the entire HSE annual budget.

HSE complacency

Report co-author Professor Andrew Watterson of Stirling University – the report was prepared in conjunction with Hazards - was scathing in his criticism of strategy documents presented by HSE to the meeting. “HSE's recommendations for action range from complacent to non-existent,” he said. “Its evaluations on cancer causing substances including benzene, cadmium, diesel exhaust and wood dust are error-ridden, inadequate and outdated, whole categories of workers known to be at high risk are ignored, and HSE cannot quantify and continues to neglect the risk to women.”

Breast cancer, the major occupational and environmental cancer risk for women, “is entirely off HSE's radar,” Professor Watterson said. “The net result of this shocking complacency will be needless exposures and avoidable deaths.” Professor Watterson says the HSE approach is blighted by poor research, unsustainable assumptions and a “shocking” ignorance of real-life conditions in many workplaces. “HSE has for decades used low estimates of risks to tell itself occupational cancer is no big deal. It backs this up with assumptions about occupational cancers today being the product of exposures two decades ago, when in fact many - like chrome, arsenic, aromatic amine, benzene, asbestos, nickel and wood dust cancers - can have latency periods of way under 10 years, and tops it off with mistaken assumptions about today’s workplaces being relatively safe.”

He points to the risk from exposure to respirable crystalline silica. HSE has assumed the numbers exposed to relatively high levels were tiny.

For stonemasonry, for example, both HSE and the industry thought no workers exposed to levels above 0.1mg/m³. But surveys conducted by HSE last year suggest 3,150 workers could be exposed above this level, and 1,425 were potentially exposed to 0.3mg/ m³ or more. In construction, it estimated 30 per cent of workers in “significant risk activities” could be receiving regular exposures in excess of 0.1mg/m³.

Whole industries facing an increased work cancer rate – for example, painters and firefighters – were missing entirely from HSE’s cancer workplan.

Victims miss out

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.

The report was prepared for the Cancer Prevention Coalition, an alliance of academics, trades unions and environmental and occupational cancer campaigners. It warned that for certain workers, the cancer risk is exceptionally high, concluding: “HSE fails to recognise the social inequality in occupational cancer risk, which is concentrated in skilled and unskilled manual workers and lower employment grades, or the greater likelihood these groups will experience multiple exposures to carcinogens at work and in the wider environment.”

Hilda Palmer of the Hazards Campaign, a member of the coalition, said: “Occupational cancer is not a disease of the boardroom – almost all the risk is borne by just one-fifth of the workforce. They are not told they are at risk, they are not provided health surveillance and they don’t get the early diagnosis that can be the difference between living and dying. They are not dying of ignorance; they are dying of neglect.”

The Stirling report calls for “sunsetting” to phase out where possible many common workplace carcinogens, and a “Toxics Use Reduction” policy to help wean companies on to safer alternative substances and processes. These approaches have worked well elsewhere, and have been supported by both workplace and environmental health advocates and industry.

References

Burying the evidence: How the UK is prolonging the occupational cancer epidemic, Stirling University/Hazards magazine, 25 June 2007.

Coal Health Compensation Schemes: Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, HC 608 2006-2007. Executive summary • NAO website

Self-reported Work-related Illness and workplace injuries in 2005/06: Results from the Labour Force Survey, HSE, 2007 [pdf]

HSE statistics webpages. .

Resources

Hazards work cancer webpages

Hazards Work cancer prevention kit

Hazards asbestos webpages

Hazards work and health webpages

ETUI-HESA occupational cancer webpages