Firefighters are exposed not only to predictable fire effluents and fuels released during combustion, but also to novel man-made chemicals intentionally added to consumer products. In this paper, policies, processes and regulations adopted to recognize the diseases created by these hazards within the UK and internationally are examined and the problems and solutions illustrated. Diseases include but are not restricted to occupational cancers. Many diseases remain unrecognized in the UK industrial disease prescription system and may not have been detected because of a lack of health surveillance and screening. Hence, assessing the impact of firefighters’ exposures requires active surveillance for the expected and the unexpected. Comprehensive health monitoring and health surveillance with a preventive focus is needed. The broadest range of available tools should be considered to better establish exposures and their consequences, including risks to both male and female firefighters. The paper identifies some recent positive global approaches to firefighter health surveillance, monitoring and disease recognition that could and should be adopted in the UK.
Watterson et al. (Thu,) studied this question.