APPENDIX 46
Letter to the Clerk of the Committee from
Professor A J P Dalton, consultant, researcher and writer on environmental
and occupational hazards
1. For 25 years I have been involved in
researching and preventing occupational and environmental diseases
and the results of that work are to be found in my most recent
book: Safety, Health and Environmental Hazards at the Workplace,
Cassell (1998).
2. Occupational cancer has been with me
since I first worked as a lab technician in the pharmaceutical
industry and an 18-year-old colleague was advised to leave the
industry as he was developing leukaemia as a result of working
with anti-cancer drugs! Was this ever recorded as an occupational
exposure, I now wonder?
3. My first publication, in 1975, concerned
the occupational health hazards of mineral oil; of which skin
and scrotal cancer were common. Indeed, 200 years before, Dr Percival
Pott in the UK noted the first occupational cancer, cancer of
the scrotum, in chimney sweeps—probably the same chemical
agents as in oil—and recently I read a Swedish medical study
showing chimney sweeps still have elevated levels of this cancer.
4. However, the substance on which I have
done most work is asbestos and I wrote my most important work,
Asbestos Killer Dust, in 1979. Professor Peto and others
have since written of the hidden and preventable "cancer
epidemic" due to asbestos exposure that now claims 5,000
a year (more than killed on the roads, 3,500) that may rise to
10,000 per annum in the UK alone by 2030. He has also estimated
figures for Europe that may see 250,000 deaths from asbestos cancers
in the next 30 years!
5. All this for a dust that was described
as "evil" in the 1898 Annual Report of HM Inspector
of Factories to Parliament. Parliament, by the way, took care
to have most of its asbestos removed in 1978! See Magic Mineral
to Killer Dust, Geoffrey Tweedale, OUP (2000) for more on
this carcinerous public health disaster.
6. The vast range of occupational carcinogens
is listed in books such as, Hunter's Diseases of Occupations,
9th Edn, Arnold (2000); although I think their views are still
conservative.
7. There is a lack of research still on
occupational and environmental cancer (eg from the chemical industry,
pesticides, microelectronics industry) and cigarettes can provide
a convenient "smoke screen" for many occupationally-related
lung cancers.
8. Occupational cancers—whether 2
per cent, 8 per cent or 20 per cent of all cancers—can,
and should, be prevented in the 21st century.
9. I hope that your Committee will recognise
this much neglected fact and make the appropriate recommendations.
14 April 2000
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