Occupational safety and health in Europe - state and trends 2023 
European Agency for Safety and Health at Work – EU-OSHA 74 
one causal agent and relatively easy to identify. On the other hand, there are all sorts of disorders 
without strong or specific connections to occupation and with numerous possible causal agents. ’176 
Some professions and regular work tasks had and have very specific risks, for example, hearing 
disability through high noise levels, or musculoskeletal diseases caused by permanent repetition of a 
certain movement or posture, or specific cancers after exposure to carcinogenic chemical substances, 
infections in healthcare or work in laboratories, or allergies to natural substances in agriculture. Some 
examples are:  
 
       Occupation, work task, exposure    Occupational disease 
• healthcare of infected persons    ► infection with the same disease 
• highly repetitive hand and arm movements  ► epicondylitis 
• quartz dust      ► silicosis 
• working long hours in a kneeling position  ► bursitis 
• extensive UV exposure     ► skin cancer 
• aromatic amines     ► bladder cancer 
• professional musicians     ► focal dystonia  
• grain dust (agriculture)     ► allergies, asthma  
 
Specific and strong connections between a risk and an outcome (risk pairs) are covered by 
occupational disease recognition schemes  in the EU Member S tates. 177  Some countries have 
opening options in their list systems, that is, in principle every disease with a dominant cause in working 
conditions can be recognised. However, many court cases about the recognition of occupational 
diseases demonstrate that a clear cause-effect relationship is not always evident, that is, due to missing 
workplace exposure data from the past or competing causes in private circumstances. All occupational 
diseases with a principally unambiguous relation between cause and consequence account only for a 
small percentage of all work-related diseases.178 
We can observe a decrease of some of the major recognised diseases ,179 either triggered by 
preventive measures or triggered by shifts of workforce to sectors with less recognised occupational 
diseases. The new experimental EODS Statistics of Eurostat180  documents the following 
developments of recognised occupational diseases.  
 
Table 21: Development of recognised occupational diseases in the EU 2013-2019