WHO Calls for Prevention of Cancer Through Healthy Workplaces
Source: World Health Organization
The World Health Organization is calling on governments to enact meaningful reform to workplace safety laws and to increase the measures used to protect workers from work-related injury or death. At least 200,000 people die every year from work-caused cancers and millions more are regularly exposed to carcinogenic agents that can dramatically shorten their life expectancy. Mesothelioma, lung cancer and leukemia are just three examples of work-related cancers that can be prevented with the passage and enforcement of meaningful reform.
Specific WHO recommendations include:
The World Health Organization is calling on governments to enact meaningful reform to workplace safety laws and to increase the measures used to protect workers from work-related injury or death. At least 200,000 people die every year from work-caused cancers and millions more are regularly exposed to carcinogenic agents that can dramatically shorten their life expectancy. Mesothelioma, lung cancer and leukemia are just three examples of work-related cancers that can be prevented with the passage and enforcement of meaningful reform.
Specific WHO recommendations include:
- Stop the use of asbestos;
- Introduce benzene-free organic solvents and technologies that convert the carcinogenic chromium into a non-carcinogenic form;
- Ban tobacco use at the workplace; and
- Provide protective clothes for people working in the sun.
The majority of workplace-related deaths currently occur in the developed world, but developing nations represent a new horizon of workplace health epidemics. The WHO's policy recommendations are made to governments in both the developed and the developing world in order to protect workers everywhere.
Labels: asbestos, lung cancer, mesothelioma
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