AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL MEDICINE 36:586 (1999)

Letter to the Editor

RE: Spontaneous Abortion in the UKSemiconductor Industry

We U.K. scientists share several of the concerns

expressed about the HSE study by Fowler, LaDou, Osorio,

Paul, Swan and Teitelbaum. The HSE article appears to

dismiss the adoption of a precautionary approach to

workplace reproductive occupational health problems

which we view as so important. A recent commentator

pointed out that the HSSE tends to ignore occupational

health problems and only seems to take action on work-

place accidents in the U.K. courts. The HSE is in a

position to control precisely how it uses or releases its

non-peer reviewed work and can respond to any comments

on its workÐwhich it does rapidly when workers,

communities and academics express concerns about HSE

research.

The HSE has produced a small and limited investiga-

tion which it claims proves the absence of reproductive

health problems in the semiconductor industry. This is

despite larger peer-reviewed studies existing with the

scienti®c literature which present a somewhat different

picture. The HSE itself admits the limits of sample size

and time frame in this study and does not contest the

point that excluding women with history of previous SABs

could well have biased the results.

Also, in the UK semiconductor industry, occupational

hygiene practices and exposure data have still neither been

fully explored nor documented adequately by HSE in the

public domain and certainly not in this study.

The HSE would be more convincing if it was far

more transparent from the inception to the completion

of all of its occupational hygiene and epidemiological

investigations.

Professor Andrew Watterson (Director)

Professor Martin Silberschmidt, MD, DMSc

Simon Pickvance, Senior Research Fellow

Rory O'Neill, Senior Research Fellow

Peter Kirby, Senior Research Fellow

Jim Brophy, Senior Research Fellow

Margaret Keith, Senior Research Fellow

Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health

De Montfort University

Leicester, England

Dr. Charles Woolfson

Glasgow University and Scottish H&S Network

Leicester, LE79SU UK

ß 1999Wiley-Liss, Inc.