Long working hours increasing deaths from heart disease and stroke.

Long working hours led to 745 000 deaths from stroke and ischemic heart disease in 2016, a 29 per cent increase since 2000, according to the latest estimates by the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization published in Environment International today.  

In a first global analysis of the loss of life and health associated with working long hours, WHO and ILO estimate that, in 2016, 398 000 people died from stroke and 347 000 from heart disease as a result of having worked at least 55 hours a week. Between 2000 and 2016, the number of deaths from heart disease due to working long hours increased by 42%, and from stroke by 19%.

This work-related disease burden is particularly significant in men (72% of deaths occurred among males), people living in the Western Pacific and South-East Asia regions, and middle-aged or older workers. Most of the deaths recorded were among people dying aged 60-79 years, who had worked for 55 hours or more per week between the ages of 45 and 74 years.

With working long hours now known to be responsible for about one-third of the total estimated work-related burden of disease, it is established as the risk factor with the largest occupational disease burden. This shifts thinking towards a relatively new and more psychosocial occupational risk factor to human health.

The study concludes that working 55 or more hours per week is associated with an estimated 35% higher risk of a stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared to working 35-40 hours a week.

Further, the number of people working long hours is increasing, and currently stands at 9% of the total population globally.  This trend puts even more people at risk of work-related disability and early death.

The new analysis comes as the COVID-19 pandemic shines a spotlight on managing working hours; the pandemic is accelerating developments that could feed the trend towards increased working time.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed the way many people work,“ said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. "Teleworking has become the norm in many industries, often blurring the boundaries between home and work. In addition, many businesses have been forced to scale back or shut down operations to save money, and people who are still on the payroll end up working longer hours. No job is worth the risk of stroke or heart disease. Governments, employers and workers need to work together to agree on limits to protect the health of workers.”

“Working 55 hours or more per week is a serious health hazard,” added Dr Maria Neira, Director, Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health, at the World Health Organization. “It’s time that we all, governments, employers, and employees wake up to the fact that long working hours can lead to premature death”.

Governments, employers and workers can take the following actions to protect workers’ health:   

• governments can introduce, implement and enforce laws, regulations and policies that ban mandatory overtime and ensure maximum limits on working time;
• bipartite or collective bargaining agreements between employers and workers’ associations can arrange working time to be more flexible, while at the same time agreeing on a maximum number of working hours;
• employees could share working hours to ensure that numbers of hours worked do not climb above 55 or more per week.   

New Technology Trends We Will See In The 2021

The year 2010 doesn’t sound like it was that long ago, but technology moves fast. A decade ago Tinder, Uber and Instagram didn’t exist. No one wore wearables, nobody talked to their gadgets at home and the Tesla was just an idea. The next decade looks set to move even faster. So here’s our tour of the new science and tech trends to look out for this decade. 

Synthetic media will undermine reality

You know about deepfake technology, where someone’s face is switched into an existing video scene. But deepfakes are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to synthetic media – a much wider phenomenon of super-realistic, artificially generated photos, text, sound and video that seems destined to shake our notions of what is actually ‘real’ over the next decade. 

There will be a revolution in cloud robotics

Until now, robots have carried their pretty feeble brains inside them. They’ve received instructions – such as rivet this, or carry that – and done it. Not only that, but they’ve worked in environments such as factories and warehouses specially designed or adapted for them.

Cloud robotics promises something entirely new; robots with super-brains stored in the online cloud. The thinking is that these robots, with their intellectual clout, will be more flexible in the jobs they do and the places they can work, perhaps even speeding up their arrival in our homes.

Google Cloud and Amazon Cloud both have robot brains that are learning and growing inside them. The dream behind cloud robotics is to create robots that can see, hear, comprehend natural language and understand the world around them. 

Diseases will be edited out of our DNA

The birth of the world’s first gene-edited babies caused uproar in 2018. The twin girls whose genomes were tinkered with during IVF procedures had their DNA altered using the gene-editing technology CRISPR, to protect them from HIV. CRISPR uses a bacterial enzyme to target and cut specific DNA sequences. 

We will begin to see living machines

Synthetic biologists have been redesigning life for decades now, but so far they’ve mostly been messing about with single cells – a kind of souped-up version of genetic modification. 

We will take mushrooms with us to space

If we have to flee Earth to take up residence elsewhere in the galaxy, you know what we need to take with us? Mushrooms. Or rather, fungal spores. Not to feed us on the flight over there, but to grow our houses with.

That’s the thinking behind NASA´s myco-architecture project. The space agency is concocting a plan to grow buildings made out of fungi on Mars. According to astrobiologist Lynn R. who works on the project, it’s a no-brainer when you consider the cost of launching a full-size building into space, versus some practically weightless life-forms that happen to be natural builders. “We want to take as little as possible with us and be able to use the resources there,” she says.