Health
Work can be lethal
by Linley Boniface
Every year, more New Zealanders die from occupational diseases than from road accidents. How can workers minimise the risks?
In 1917, Grace Fryer and her workmates would paint their nails and teeth with glow-in-the-dark radium paint to give their boyfriends a laugh when the lights went out. The women, who worked in a New Jersey factory painting the compound onto watch dials, had no concerns about sharpening their brushes by dipping them into their mouths – radium was, after all, a health-giving substance known as “liquid sunshine”, and even considered by some to be a cure for cancer.
Fryer was surprised to discover that when she blew her nose, her handkerchief glowed in the dark, but she didn’t start worrying until her jaw began to decay. As the dangers of radium poisoning became more widely known, Fryer and four former co-workers sued US Radium. The five “Radium Girls” won an out-of-court settlement, but none lived long enough to enjoy it.
Radium sickness among the dial painters, “phossy jaw” among match factory workers, black lung disease among coal miners, and asbestosis among people working with asbestos are the most notorious historical examples of occupational diseases, but jobs can still be lethal. The World Health Organisation estimates that every year at least 200,000 people around the world die from workplace-related cancers alone.
According to a 2004 report by New Zealand’s National Occupational Health and Safety Advisory Committee (NOSAC), an estimated 700-1000 New Zealanders die from occupational diseases – mainly cancer, respiratory disease and heart disease – each year. There are about 100 deaths from workplace injuries each year, and 17,000 to 20,000 new cases of work-related disease.
However, the committee says there is so little reliable data on workplace diseases and injuries that New Zealand has a long way to go in even identifying the scale of the problem, let alone doing anything about it.
Professor Neil Pearce, director of Massey University’s Centre for Public Health Research, believes New Zealand fell below international standards when it stopped keeping a central record of patients’ occupations in the 1990s. “New Zealand does very poorly in international terms, which is reflected in the fact that we don’t even code the material we have on patients’ occupations. Most other western countries take occupational diseases more seriously than we do,” he says.
GPs are unlikely to know their patients’ current jobs, he says, let alone the jobs they held in the past. As a result, links between jobs and illness often go unidentified.
New Zealand’s main tool for alerting the health service to work-related diseases is the Notifiable Occupational Disease System. It’s voluntary, and it relies on GPs and other health professionals notifying Occupational Safety and Health of patients with health problems that may be related to their jobs. NOSAC says the system suffers from low reporting levels, and has recommended setting up an independent unit to monitor occupational diseases and injuries.
Occupational cancers are thought to account for about 330 deaths a year in New Zealand – about five percent of all cancers. This month, researchers at the Centre for Public Health Research released reports showing an increased risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and bladder cancer for people in certain occupations.
Workers in plant nurseries are four times more likely than the general population to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, apple and pear growers are at five times the risk, and vegetable growers and other horticultural producers are at more than twice the risk. The increased risk is thought to be because of growers’ contact with pesticides.
Other workers with a higher than average chance of getting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma include meat workers, cleaners, heavy-truck drivers and workers involved in manufacturing metal products. The cause of the increased risks is thought to be exposure to animal viruses, cleaning chemicals, petrochemicals and trace metals.
The researchers also found that hairdressers have nine times the average risk of suffering from bladder cancer, while sewing machinists have three times the risk. Hairdressers and sewing machinists are exposed to a group of known carcinogens called aromatic amines, which include benzidine. Although several aromatic amines are banned, chemicals with a similar structure to benzidine are still used in hair and fabric dyes.
“If you get rid of one chemical that may cause cancer and replace it with another chemical, everyone thinks it’s okay. It’s often not until 15 to 20 years later that people realise the new chemical may be causing similar problems,” says Pearce.
Workers with an increased cancer risk should try to minimise their exposure to potentially hazardous substances, he says. “There’s no need to panic, but it is important to take the issue seriously. After all, there are more people killed by occupational diseases in New Zealand than die on the roads.”
