Três em um com notícias que podem influenciar práticas cotidianas em muito serviços de saúde e ou de assessoria jurídica a expostos a amianto.
1. France: Court orders compensation for psychological harm
On June 3 Compiegne's labour court issued a verdict ordering Saint-Gobain to compensate 130 employees of its specialized glass manufacturing and processing factory in Thourotte in Oise.
The verdict specified the company must pay 20,000 euro compensation to each worker for "psychological harm" resulting from their exposure to asbestos in previous years. According to media reports, the judges ruled that the current and former employees were "substantially exposed to the inhalation of asbestos fibres" under conditions "subsequent to a breach of the contractual obligation of safety provoked by their employer "and that they suffered "harm" that "should be repaired".
The workers' lawyer, Elisabeth Leroux, said, "This is a very good decision, the employees have been exposed to asbestos, they are now undergoing increased medical monitoring which provokes anxiety, they see their co-workers dying ... It's a big satisfaction to obtain compensation for this harm."
The verdict in favour of the workers sets a new precedent due to the French Supreme Court April 5 decision to extend damage coverage to all French workers in contact with asbestos, which means French workers exposed to asbestos can claim for damage caused by anxiety related to the consequences of their asbestos exposure regardless of where they worked, if they can prove they were exposed to and suffer from 'anxiety damage'. Read more: IndustriALL media release
More information on the site: Asbestos in the home and Asbestos in the workplace
2. International Union News
UK: Union campaign on work-related bladder cancer
UK union GMB is launching an awareness campaign on the link between work in certain industries and bladder cancer. The union's annual Congress decision commits it to target a problem it says particularly affects workers in the chemical dye and rubber industries. However, the union said the chemicals linked to bladder cancer also occur "in hair dyes, paints, fungicides, cigarette smoke, plastics, pollutant emissions from industrial installations, and metal and motor vehicle exhausts, which can affect both male and females."
GMB says there are an estimated 100,000 men and women living with bladder cancer in the UK and approximately 15,000 new cases are diagnosed annually, making it the fifth most common cancer overall. GMB London's regional secretary, Warren Kenny, said: "Occupational bladder claims thousands of lives per year, and it is likely that official statistics are underestimated as there are many causes of the cancer, meaning the link to work is often not made. Due to the long latency before symptoms manifest, it is often perceived to be an older person's condition. As such there has been little campaigning for preventative approaches and such an approach is long overdue." He said the union would work with both the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Fight Bladder Cancer campaign to "provide a much needed focus on this overlooked cancer and help to provide access to decision-makers in industry and government who can help address the shortage of research funding and poor prioritisation of bladder cancer."
Read more: GMB news release. Fight Bladder Cancer. Source: Risks 901
3. Wrist movement and carpel tunnel syndrome
Danish and Swedish researchers have conducted a large cohort study to investigate the association between work-related wrist movements and carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS).
They performed electro-goniometric measurements of wrist movements for 30 jobs, such as office work, child care, laundry work and slaughterhouse work. They measured wrist angular velocity, mean power frequency (MPF) and range of motion (ROM). The cohort of Danish citizens born 1940–1979 who held one of these jobs from age 18–80 years, was established using Danish national registers with annual employment information from 1992 to 2014. They updated the cohort by calendar year with job-specific and sex-specific means of measured exposures. Dates of a first diagnosis or operation because of CTS were retrieved from the Danish National Patient Register. The risk of CTS by quintiles of preceding exposure levels was assessed by adjusted incidence rate ratios (IRRadj) using Poisson regression models.
Not surprisingly, they found that high levels of wrist movement were associated with an increased risk of CTS. The researchers concluded that preventive strategies should be aimed at jobs with high levels of wrist movements such as cleaning, laundry work and slaughterhouse work.
Read more: Christina Bach Lund, et al, Movements of the wrist and the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome: a nationwide cohort study using objective exposure measurements [Open access article], Occupational & Environmental Medicine, BMJ
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