Cancer: A Major Public Health Issue Associated with Occupational Environment and Safety
摘要
Although cancer is a multifactorial disease, evidence indicates that the occupational environment is the predominant contributor to many types of cancer. It has been reported that approximately 2–8% of all cancers are linked to occupational hazards. Therefore, occupational environment and safety are now considered the most significant concern for human health and wellbeing. As people spend a substantial part of their daily hours in the workplace, ensuring safety in the workplace or environment can be helpful for health promotion, especially in developing countries, like Bangladesh. In this chapter, different topics, especially types of professions, indoor and outdoor work environments, categories of the causative carcinogenic agents, workers’ health outcomes upon acute or chronic exposures to agents, and cancers linked to different industries will be discussed. We believe immediate identification, monitoring, and control of workplace-related problems will help ensure occupational safety. Moreover, this chapter also addressed the association of occupational cancer with individual genome sequences because studying the role of genomics in the context of occupational hazards will certainly allow designing effective strategies to improve the quality of the work environment, ensure health safety, and improve the quality of life of employees by preventing different workplace-associated diseases. Background: Occupational healthOccupational health describes the health of people in workplaces. This area of study includes the workers’ safety and the betterment of their health in the workplace. Due to rapid industrial growth and development, occupational health-related issues are now considered a significant health concern. Thus, it is essential to tackle the emerging occupational health problems with other public health issues like inadequate health care, overall environmental hygiene, communicable or non-communicable diseases, and malnutrition.