ABSTRACT
The shift in population age is also increasing the dependency ratio. Work is important to good health, although until recently the evidence base for this has tended to focus on the more negative association between certain employments and ill health. Bernardino Ramazzini, often credited as the ‘father' of modern occupational medicine, after the publication of a carefully observed study of the link between different forms of work and disease, wrote in 1713, ‘various and manifold is the harvest of diseases reaped by certain workers from crafts and trades they pursue'. Occupational medicine texts document the now well-described associations between a wide variety of occupations and exposure to physical, chemical, biological, and psychosocial hazards during work. Bladder cancer was noted in groups of workers in the rubber industry, nasal cancer was more common in woodworkers and the ‘mad hatter' is an apocryphal documentation of the hazards of working with chemicals in felt manufacturing.
