Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what information his Department holds on the number of farm-related deaths from (a) slurry, (b) machinery, (c) disease and (d) collapsing buildings in each of the last five years.

The Health and Safety Executive publishes figures on farm-related deaths annually in a report ‘Fatal injuries in agriculture, forestry and fishing in Great Britain. These are available on the HSE website at http://www.hse.gov.uk/agriculture/resources/fatal.htm. The published reports do not include deaths attributable to disease.

Most diseases have a range of causes and so the scale of mortality attributed specifically to occupational causes such as exposures in farming has to be estimated based on epidemiological information. An exception is occupational alveolitis, an allergic lung disease for which annual deaths can be identified directly from national mortality statistics, and which are shown in the table below for the five most recent available years. Most of these deaths were due to a form of the disease called “Farmer’s lung” which is caused by inhalation of dust or spores arising from mouldy hay, grain and straw.

An indication of the current scale of annual cancer deaths attributed to past occupational exposures is provided by HSE commissioned research into the burden of occupational cancer. Using mortality data for year 2005, this research estimated that approximately 86 annual cancer deaths are attributable to past exposures to carcinogens in farming. Estimates are currently not available of how many annual Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) deaths are attributable to past occupational exposures in farming.