Cancer is a major cause of death worldwide and there are many efforts to tackle it. Occupational cancer is a cancer caused fully or partially by exposure to a cancer-causing agent at work. It has been estimated that 8% of all cancers are caused by exposures to carcinogens in the workplace. Using the cancer incidence numbers in the EU-27, this means that there are about 122000 new cancer cases in the EU each year caused by occupational exposure [1]. This number is very likely to be an underestimate because of the long latency of cancer, and difficulties in establishing a causal relationship between occupational exposure and cancer. On the other hand, millions of EU workers are currently exposed to thousands of (process generated) substances and mixtures for which a detailed risk assessment of their carcinogenic properties is not available [2,3]. Occupational cancer can be prevented by limiting exposure to zero. Since limiting exposure will reduce the number of cases in the long run, it is worth focusing on this by timely understanding the risks and developing measures to control them. In the European Environment Agency report Late Lessons From Early Warnings [4], a selection of occupational, public health and environmental emerging risks were evaluated. One of their main conclusions was that there is a lack of institutional and other mechanisms to respond to early warning signals. The report shows that by ignoring early warnings by businesses, and manufacturing doubt about the science supporting such warnings, costs are transferred to society. Reducing the delay between early warnings and actions is one of their main recommendations.
https://ift.tt/2pJn0qH
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου