Evidence on Occupational Hazards

The literature on epidemiologic findings is surveyed in other chapters of this book and elsewhere ( 5-7). As a summary, studies on food poisoning episodes have shown that the ingestion of alkylmercury and food oil contaminated by technical polychlorinated biphenyls leads to congenital defects in the offspring. It also appears to be relatively well proven that 

By this time there should be sufficient understanding and agreement on methods and data bases large enough for case retrieval in order to assess further the role of occupational and other environmental factors in reproduction (see e.g. 5.6). He thus feel that epidemiologic studies on reproduction have an important role in occupational health. The role is emphasized due to the lack of validation of animal models, as discussed later. Thus this field of epidemiology appears as a key research instrument in the prevention of occupational hazards. 

Extensive industrial hygiene surveys have been carried out in many countries, and they have provided information on the types 

There has been a general trend towards an increase in women s participation in the paid labor force after the Second World War. In many industrialized countries the proportion of economically active women in the total female population is nowadays over 40 %. In the future, the growth of the female labor force has been predicted to continue. 

Women tend to work in a narrow range of traditional female jobs (11). In Finland. 45 % of the women were employed in occupations totally predominated by women at least 91 % of the workers were women (12). Women are most often employed as service workers, clerical workers, or professional and technical workers. For instance, in Finland the most common occupations of women in i960 were farm worker, cleaning woman, sales worker, office clerk and nurse (13). Typical occupations of women in industry are textile, clothing, food industry, or packing work. 

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