Editor's Note
Sick of Work
Where we are or where we have been can determine when or whether we get sick. A trip to Africa can bring us into contact with a malaria-infested mosquito. A jaunt to Wisconsin can lead to an unwelcome encounter with a Lyme-infected tick. Yet the unglamorous locales of our life, our workplaces, may be the most dangerous places of all.
For centuries, worker illness or injury was accepted as inevitable, part of the cost of doing business. The most cynical of employers viewed employees as expendable. During the 19th century in the United States, whether it was on the plantations of the deep South or in the factories of the North, worker disability, dismemberment, and even death were realities that seemed as unavoidable as cholera and smallpox. Even if an employer were enlightened and wanted to protect his employees, he frequently had to resign himself to “how things were.”
Certainly some employers were neither enlightened nor caring. During the 1920s, the infamous U.S. Radium Corporation of Orange, New Jersey, systematically denied the bone-necrosing and carcinogenic properties of the radioactive luminescent paint that their watch-dial painters ingested every day as they licked the tips of their brushes to maintain a point. The company only relented after prolonged legal action and championing by columnist Walter Lippmann brought the diseases of the “radium girls” into the national limelight.
The watch-dial painters became a textbook case of how work can injure and spawned an entire subspecialty of medicine that acknowledged that work can make you sick. Today, occupational medicine literature sports a colorful pantheon of the maladies of pipefitters, silo fillers, and malt workers. New work-related ailments continue to crop up, and recent research is exploring less obvious hazards of work exposures including those to reproductive health (p. 44).
Most of us in medicine rarely considered the risks we encounter daily in our jobs until reports of hepatitis B or HIV acquired while working in the health fields brought us up short and we realized that even the practice of medicine can be hazardous. Recently, widely publicized limits on resident hours have spotlighted sleep deprivation as a danger to both physicians and patients. Too much of any job can threaten your health.
In recent years, true enlightenment has come to the workplace. Employers recognize the value of keeping employees healthy and thus they are willing to pay to prevent illness and to rehabilitate them when they do fall ill (pp. 10, 14). The cost of doing business now emphasizes the importance of maintaining productive workers rather than quickly dispensing with disabled ones.
For most of us, work occupies a big chunk of our time. Probability alone suggests that some of us sometime will fall ill at or because of our work. But clearly we can improve the odds and make work a safer place to be.
Charles R. Meyer, M.D., editor in chief
Dr. Meyer can be reached at
cmeyer1@fairview.org