Sarah-Jane’s father Ron died from acute myeloid leukaemia as a result of being exposed to benzene, a substance he worked with as a carpenter and woodworker.
Cancer caused by work claims the lives of 666,000 people a year worldwide.
Many employers and workers are unaware of the impact of carcinogenic exposures. IOSH’s No Time to Lose campaign aims to get the causes of occupational cancer more widely understood and help businesses take action.
Find out more and get free resources at
http://tinyurl.com/NoTimeToLose-website
http://tinyurl.com/NTTL-SarahJane-transcript
Film transcript
I’m Sarah-Jane and my father’s name was Ron, and in March 2012 my father returned from holiday and he’d just been travelling for three months and everything seemed fine. And then a week later I went to see him and he was very yellow and he’d lost a lot of weight in the space of seven days. He went to the doctors and was referred to the hospital straight away. We found out that he’d got acute myeloid leukaemia. Acute myeloid leukaemia is a cancer that is very rare and it’s known to be caused by extreme exposure to radiation or a substance called benzene. And this is a substance that my dad would have had plenty of dealings with being a carpenter and a woodworker. It would have been in the adhesives and the paints and the varnishes. So, quickly after he started his treatment he had a heart attack and he couldn’t take the chemotherapy. In the early hours of the morning the next day I was called to the hospital. And I had just an hour with my dad before he passed away very quickly. His heart gave way and he wasn’t able to take the chemotherapy that was needed to cure the leukaemia. It all happened so quick. As a family we were devastated and we just had no warning at all. I think this shows that there’s lots of occupations out there where they’re not deemed as ‘dangerous’, but they can be. And exposing yourself to chemicals now, could be absolutely disastrous in, say, 40 years’ time.
