ABSTRACT
Arguably, the shifts in location have not been matched by a shift in knowledge of occupational disease prevention and good occupational health practice. This is not to claim that the only examples of good practice are to be found in the post-industrial western economies, whose histories in this respect are far from laudable (Pearce and Matos, 1994b), but it is very likely that, globally, there are now far more workers exposed to signicant and unregulated risks of occupational lung disease than ever previously, an example of ‘risk transition’. The International Labour Organisation (ILO), for example, estimates that 2 million of the world’s 2.5 billion workers die each year from occupational accidents or diseases, a third of the latter comprising respiratory cancers and interstitial lung disease; these gures are almost certainly a signicant underestimate. Signicantly, many of these workers are confronted with exposures whose hazards are well known and for which there are effective means of control (Kjellstrom and Rosenstock, 1990). An egregious example is the aggressive marketing of both tobacco and asbestos, with their synergistically high contribution to lung cancer, in parts of the world where the regulation of both remains lax (Jamison et al., 2006).
