THE UK Government recently accepted a Convention and a Recommendation, drawn up at last year's International Labour Conference, on ‘international standards concerning the protection of workers against carcinogenic substances or agents’. Both documents will play their part in establishing some useful principles and eliminating past abuses. But the practical achievement will fall short of what is usually understood by ‘international standards’, and the proportion of actual cancers prevented is likely to be only a fraction of the potential number. Laura Swaffield reports.
