Work-related cancer: emerging from obscurity

Soumaila Sacko was assassinated in San Calogero on Saturday evening, 2 June 2018. 29 years old, born in Mali and working on a farm in Southern Italy, he lived together with some 5,000 other day labourers from Africa in one of the ramshackle settlements dotted around the plain of Gioia Tauro, an agricultural region in Calabria. Together with two of... Find out more

"Brussels is the lobbying capital of Europe. And with so many of our national laws starting life at EU level, it is not difficult to see why. Big corporations, industry lobby groups, lobby consultancies and law firms spend hundreds of millions of euros every year to ensure that EU policymaking meets the needs of big business – and it very often... Find out more

The primary cause of work-related mortality, occupational cancers cause high costs for workers, employers and health systems in all European countries. But it is the workers and their families who have to bear nearly all of these costs. The revision of the Carcinogens and Mutagens Directive (CMD), now relaunched, should help reduce the number of... Find out more

Kosovo, Europe’s youngest country, has the world’s fifth largest reserves of lignite, the cheapest and poorest quality coal and also considered to be the dirtiest fossil fuel. But has this been an asset or a curse for Kosovo? In thermal power plants Kosovo A and Kosovo B, salaries are generous but workers often fall ill and even die of respiratory... Find out more

In Dottignies, a village a few kilometres away from Mouscron on the Belgian-French border, a man has been fighting for several months to get his partner’s cancer recognised as having been caused by her work. Working for a company in the textile sector, she was exposed to a carcinogenic solvent for fifteen years. More than a year after receiving the... Find out more

Australian researchers have developed an IT tool for evaluating the exposure to carcinogens in a large number of industries. Used to process responses to a survey of 5,000 workers on their occupational exposure to carcinogens, it delivered concerning results: two Australians out of five are exposed to at least one carcinogen at work. Occupational... Find out more

In a hospital in the south of France, one oncologist has managed to mobilise his entire department and others around a project to support patients suffering from work-related cancers. By tracking their occupational exposure to carcinogens, the project helps them to get their illness recognised as an occupational illness and raises the profile of a... Find out more

Faced with two institutions largely averse to self-criticism, the medical sector and the justice system, one Spanish nurse stood her ground: her long battle for recognition of the occupational nature of the cancer that affected her almost 20 years ago has finally been won. She has taken this opportunity to highlight the risks other nurses face from... Find out more

Life expectancy is rising, as is the duration of working life, while new treatments are helping people work longer despite being ill. But there are still very few support schemes for helping people to get back to work or change their field of work. “Chronic illness and activity” support groups were an experiment, focusing on peer-to-peer exchanges... Find out more

The Soviet health system was considered as being one of the best in the world. All that’s left of it in Ukraine are memories. The level of public health provision has dropped greatly over the last few years, and the hospitals are desperately under-resourced. In the east of the country, at war since 2014, healthcare staff are struggling to meet the... Find out more

If you go onto the Corsican Chamber of Commerce website, you’ll learn that "the clementines produced on the island have gained the red label, attesting superior quality differentiating them from similar products and validated by sensory analyses and tastings entrusted to a panel of consumers but also to a group of specialists". While the book... Find out more

In May 2017, Emmanuel Macron was elected as the 25th President of the French Republic. As soon as he took office, he began to actively promote the idea of the "liberation of labour", a somewhat vague concept that had figured in his election campaign, and caused some controversy and concern. In his latest book, Thomas Coutrot admits from the outset... Find out more