The Global Toll of Occupational Accidents and Diseases

DEPARTMENTS

BY THE NUMBERS

A new report issued by the International Labor Organization quantifies the number of people who die each year around the world from work-related accidents and work-related diseases. The report, “Safety and Health at the Heart of the Future of Work: Building on 100 Years of Experience,” summarizes the evolution of occupational health and safety since ILO’s founding in 1919 and addresses current trends that are changing the world of work. Information from the report appears below.

From “Safety and Health at the Heart of the Future of Work: Building on 100 Years of Experience”: “Addressing work-related hazards and risks as though they exist solely within a workplace or within national boundaries is an ineffective and incomplete strategy. Within global supply chains, both production and workers, and thus OSH risks, relocate across national borders. This necessitates global perspectives and better understandings of the interrelationship between the physical science and engineering of safe work and the medical understandings of disease and injuries, as well as the economic, regulatory and sociological understandings of the contexts that contribute to making work safe and good for health.”

SOURCE

International Labor Organization: “Safety and Health at the Heart of the Future of Work: Building on 100 Years of Experience” (PDF, 2019).

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the Synergist

In August, The Knoxville News Sentinel reported that a student intern and a researcher at Oak Ridge Associated Universities had devised an experiment to replicate the McCluskey incident in order to study the effects of radiation on the body. By irradiating vials of their own blood for different lengths of time, the researchers hope to generate data that clinicians and first responders can refer to following an exposure incident.