Australian Cancer Study Reflects TUC Findings

Australian research just published indicates that many more people are dying from work related cancers than official Australian Government figures suggest. This appears to reflect the findings of a similar study into UK cancer deaths published by the TUC last year.

In November 2005, a report in the TUC-backed journal Hazards, entitled 'Burying the evidence',stated that Britain was facing an occupational cancer epidemic that could be responsible for as many as 24,000 deaths a year, four times the figure (and the equivalent of 16 per cent of all cancer deaths in the UK) suggested by the Health and Safety Executive.

The report says that according to HSE figures, just four per cent of the UK's annual cancer death toll is as a result of exposure to carcinogens at work, which it says is equal to 6,000 deaths a year. But the article concludes that the incidence of occupational cancer in the UK is much higher at somewhere between 12,000 and 24,000 deaths a year.

However, the TUC says the problem with the statistics currently used by the Australian and UK official safety bodies, is that both base their evidence on now essentially flawed US research conducted almost 25 years ago.

Research just published by the Queensland Cancer Fund and the University of Sydney says that every year some 5,000 Australian workers - twice the officially accepted best guess for occupational cancer prevalence - develop cancer as a result of coming into contact with carcinogens in their offices or factories. This has lead to calls for Australian health and safety laws to be tightened to give employees better protection at work.

Commenting on the Australian study, report author and head of epidemiology at the Queensland Cancer Fund, Lin Fritschi, said: 'A large study [the Doll-Peto study] in the 1980s suggested that just four per cent of cancers in the workplace were caused by occupation, and that's the figure still used in Australia. But that is a really big underestimate, because that data was from the 1950s and 60s. We now know a lot more about chemicals and cancer risk than we did 20 years ago.'

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: 'This latest piece of research shows that the UK must upwardly revise its estimates of the number of work-related cancer deaths. Until it does so, the UK will continue to severely underestimate the number of workers at risk, and workers will go on being exposed needlessly to life-threatening chemicals. We need far more to be done to prevent exposure.'

The original Hazards report made a number of recommendations for action and the publication of the Australian figures has prompted the TUC to renew its call for something to be done about the UK's workplace cancer epidemic.

Source: TUC News Release

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