In the 1930s in Britain, industrial medicine was a clinical discipline, the main purposes of which were to diagnose disability in applicants for work, to identify industrial disease in the dangerous trades, and to provide first aid treatment for those injured or taken sick in the workplace. Following rapid developments in epidemiology and occupational hygiene and with more emphasis on "group he...

The Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs in collaboration with the Ministry of Health Care carries out the activities aimed at solving occupational health and safety problems in Lithuania. Occupational health care system in Lithuania consists of three levels: 1) primary occupational health centers in the industry; 2) general practitioners taking care of employees' health; and 3) the State Labor...

Occupational hygienists and other health scientists should have little problem in accepting that approaches to the management of risk should be based on soundly constructed principles of risk assessment. Such thinking permeates many aspects of occupational health practice and is reflected in supporting legal frameworks, for example the Chemical Agents Directive (EC, 1998) and UK Control of Subs...

A hierarchical Bayesian framework has been developed for exposure assessment that makes use of statistical sampling-based techniques to estimate the posterior probability of the 95th percentile or arithmetic mean of the exposure distribution being located in one of several exposure categories. The framework can synthesize professional judgment and monitoring data to yield an updated posterior e...

BACKGROUND The food industry regulates various aspects of food handler activities, according to legislation and customer expectations. The purpose of this paper is to provide a code of practice which delineates a set of working standards for food handler hygiene, handwashing, use of protective equipment, wearing of jewellery and body piercing. METHODS The code was developed by a working group...

The first Work Plan of the Global Network of WHO Collaborating Centers (CCs) in Occupational Health was initiated in November 2001, following input of the CCs to choose the 15 priority areas of work for the period 2001-2005. This article reflects upon the successes and limitations of the Work Plan, describes some of the products, and points out some 'lessons learned' that were incorporated into...