Ten times as many workers die of illness as of injury, and nobody counts them

Workers' Memorial Day, observed annually on 28 April, recognises workers
injured, made ill, or killed by exposures at work.

The two numbers behind it are collected completely differently, and that is the
point.

**Although deaths resulting from work-related injuries are captured through
surveillance, most deaths resulting from work-related illness are not.**

Roughly ten times as many, and the larger figure is an estimate from a
different decade, because no system counts them.

The asymmetry follows from how the two happen. An injury death has a date, a
place and a cause: a fall, a machine, a vehicle. An illness death has a
twenty-year latency and a diagnosis — a cancer, a lung disease — that names the
disease and not the exposure that caused it. The death certificate has nowhere
to record the job.

The injury figure was going the wrong way

**The fatal injury rate rose for the third consecutive year in 2016, to 3.6 per
100 full-time equivalent workers — the highest since 2010.**

And below the deaths: **employers reported approximately 2.9 million non-fatal
work-related injuries and illnesses among private industry workers in 2016.**

The cost

**The societal cost of work-related fatalities, injuries and illnesses was
estimated at $250 billion in 2007**, on methods counting **medical costs and
productivity losses** — so the estimate excludes everything those methods do
not price.

The industry the day was marking

New data on **fatal falls overboard in the fishing industry — one of the
nation's most hazardous** — accompanied this report. **NIOSH's Western States
Division has studied fishing safety since 1991** and developed interventions to
reduce injuries and deaths among fishermen.

Workers' Memorial Day was established in 1970 by the AFL–CIO.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MMWR.