Work-related burden of diseases and disorders

The burden of the work-related diseases is a major global health challenge. This data provides the global, regional and country level estimates on the work-related burden of occupational diseases and accidents for the year 2019 in terms of deaths, disability adjusted life years (DALYs) and economic loss as a percentage of total gross domestic product (GDP).

The data contains calculated estimates based on the employment figures, mortality rates, occupational injuries, accidents, self-reported occupational illnesses and injuries from electronic data sources of international organizations, institutions, and public websites. Risk ratios (RR) and population attributable fractions (PAF) for the risk factors outcome pairs were derived from literature. Estimated mortality and DALYs for a group of seven major diseases covering 120 risk-outcome pairs attributable to work are calculated at global, WHO regions and at country level. The details of the methodology of the data have been published already (https://www.sjweh.fi/article/4132).

In general, the method is based on the number of problems identified at work: injuries, illnesses, and disorders including fatal or no-fatal cases. This was implemented by calculating the deaths, Years of Life Lost (YLL), Years Lived with Disability (YLD) and their combination Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY) based on primarily ILO numbers as adjusted by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) Global Burden of Disease and Injury (GBD) process outcomes. While there are existing estimates updated annually by the GBD process, latest for the year 2019, these do cover only a selected group of occupational risks. Therefore, the GBD 2019 outcomes would not be comparable to ILO Estimates and – if directly used – would end up in clear underestimates of the size of the problem. The differences between ILO and GBD2015 outcomes are reported elsewhere.