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John Hobson, In this issue of Occupational Medicine, Occupational Medicine, Volume 68, Issue 5, July 2018, Page 295, https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqy089
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The International Commission on Occupational Health (ICOH) was founded in 1906 and today has 2000 members from 93 different countries. ICOH has 37 scientific committees of which the Scientific Committee on Epidemiology in Occupational Health (EPICOH) promotes communication between epidemiologists, industrial hygienists, toxicologists, exposure analysts and other occupational health scientists worldwide. The theme for EPICOH’s 2017 International Conference on Epidemiology in Occupational Health in Edinburgh, Scotland, in August 2017, was ‘eliminating occupational disease: translating research into action’ and in their editorial in this issue Paul Grime and Damien McElvenny examine some of the highlights of the conference and their implications for policy and practice [1]. The triennial ICOH conference has just been held in Dublin in May and the 2021 conference will be held in Melbourne, Australia, a major event in the occupational health calendar for anyone interested in current research.
Also at the cutting edge of occupational health, Pierluigi Cocco and Raymond Agius considered the relevance of work-related conditions on the aetiology of human ill-health [2]. They write that the fraction of ill-health attributable to occupational conditions has not been extensively evaluated and that this contributes to the perception that education and research in occupational health has less relevance than other fields of medical practice. They extracted the risk estimates associated with heritability and occupational risk factors for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL), major depressive disorder (MDD) and long QT syndrome (LQTS) from 13 published international reports. They estimated that occupational risk factors would account for 12% of CLL, 11% of MDD and 10% of LQTS burden in the general population with corresponding figures for heritability of 16, 28 and 17%, respectively. They conclude that more effort in capacity building and research in occupational health is warranted to prevent ill-health and to preserve a productive life for the ageing work population.
