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Pharmaceuticals manufacturing

29 Oct 2009

In 1950, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) declared that the goals of occupational health should be to: • promote and maintain the highest degree of physical, mental and social well-being of workers, • prevent ill-health among workers caused by their working conditions, • protect workers from factors adverse to their health in their employment, and [...] For both drugs and pesticides, manufacturers, researchers, and regulators tend to focus only on the active ingredient, to the exclusion of other substances involved in the research or production process. [...] Nanotechnologies refer to a variety of methods that use: the science of engineering on a molecular scale, in effect building matter atom-by-atom from the ‘bottom up.’ The prefix ‘nano’ denotes a fraction of one-one billionth, and nanotechnology involves the construction of matter a billionth of a meter in size: roughly the size of several atoms (International Center for Technology Assessment, 2009 [...] The researchers found that: • women were 45 percent of those exposed to chemical, radiation, and “high risk” exposures in labs and production units; • workers in pharmaceutical labs and production units were 60 percent female; • 58 percent of the workers in biological labs were women; and • 40 percent of those with indirect exposures from cleaning, washing, storage, and administrative work within [...] Given the difficulties in finding reliable information about the spectrum of hazards in drug production and R&D work, the following discussion tries to give a flavour of what is available and to raise questions about hazards that likely are present.
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Authors

Wigmore, Dorothy

Pages
61
Published in
Canada

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