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  • Home > Blog > Asbestos > WHO Calls for Prevention of Cancer Through Healthy Workplaces
Posted on Friday, May 4, 2007

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:

  • 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.