Saturday, July 28, 2012

worked to death

Yet again more evidence is being produced to show that the working time patterns enforced by mostly by the demands of the capitalist production system contributes to the early deaths of workers.

Working unsocial hours has been found to increase the chances of a heart attack by more than a fifth, with the risk of a stroke rising 5%.

Shift patterns, especially night shifts, have long been linked to high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels and diabetes but their was some doubt  about its association with heart and artery disease.

The research, the largest analysis of shift work and heart risk to date, pulled together evidence from 34 studies involving more than two million people.

Coronary events – including heart attacks and angina chest pains – and strokes were more common among shift workers. The chances of "any coronary event" were increased by 24%, and of heart attacks by 23%, while stroke risk was raised slightly by 5%. which despite the relatively small effect, the impact on a large population could be significant, the authors pointed out.

Night shifts were associated with the steepest increase in risk for coronary events, 41%.

2 comments:

Mark Pattinson said...

This research shows that night shift is becoming the reason of high blood pressure. Working unsocial hours is really getting a chance of heart attacks. Nice attempt to describe it well..

ajohnstone said...

I used to be a postal worker in a large sorting office and at Christmas, aptly described as the "pressure", people were obliged to perform compulsory overtime and would be transferred to different shifts and made to different type of duties. I guarantee we had 2 or 3 deaths every year of older staff due to this. A nice Christmas present for their families!
Only in recent years has the practice stopped and it wasn't from compassion.