8281500 Remembering history to protect the health of workers

<h3></h3> Recognising the relationship between work and health is as old has the documented history of work itself. From antiquity to the current day, various approaches have provided important insights into these relationships. This has allowed us to develop interventions to protect the health of workers. Our symposium today set out to achieve the following objectives: Raising awareness about how the history of occupational epidemiology is being lost. Recognising that the history of occupational epidemiology provides an understanding of tools necessary for investigating new associations. We emphasize how history and historiography – whether the documentation of sentinel cases, through to epidemiological investigations – creates the foundation for better understanding emerging diseases and their association with work. The historical methods used in unearthing these relationships present clinicians and occupational epidemiologists with tools to initiate sophisticated epidemiological research. While in many instances the recognition of the association or the unearthing of the evidence relies on individuals, such as Lind, Villerme and Hamilton, the documentation of sentinel cases of scrotal cancer and liver cancers and the development of case-series of mesothelioma and bronchiolitis obliterans, show that the most basic epidemiological approaches remain essential tools. Important figures such as Hill and Cochrane, household names in epidemiology generally, are often forgotten as scientists who sharpened their scientific tools in the world of work and health. Similarly, much of modern public health has its roots in those early scientists investigating the relationship between occupational exposures and disease, and identifying interventions – the fundamental basis of public health. Occupational epidemiologists are encouraged to investigate historically archived materials – not just from government based sources, but parish registers, employment records and autopsy databases. Engaging with these novel sources of evidence, epidemiologists will better understand relationships between old exposures and disease resurgence, but new exposures and potentially new outcomes.