Female workers at semiconductor manufacturing plants operated by Samsung
Electronics and Hynix Semiconductor are five times as likely to get
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the government said Monday.
However, the alleged direct relation between these work environments and the
disease has yet to be confirmed, the Korea Occupational Safety and Health
Agency (KOSHA) said.
According to the agency's study of health insurance and other medical
records of semiconductor plant workers over the past 10 years, the
likelihood of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma among female workers on the
manufacturing line was 5.16 times higher than the regular population.
Moreover, the prevalence among overall female workers there was 2.67 times
higher than men's, a significant difference in working conditions.
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a type of cancer derived from lymphocytes, a type of
white blood cell, and aggressive forms of the disease can be fatal without
treatment.
However, the agency said the correlation between the working environment and
leukemia was unclear. The chances of males getting leukemia or cancer was
lower than average, while among females, the chances of dying from the
disease were 1.48 times higher than normal, which could be considered
insignificant, Park Jung-sun, the KOSHA spokesman, said.
``Ten years is not enough time to track cause and effect between a disease
and the environment and we have yet to find out if patients were affected by
other factors such as smoking,'' Park said, delaying further speculation.
The research is the first of its kind here to verify whether working
environments of such factories actually trigger certain diseases.
The study kicked off a year ago when two leukemia patients and bereaved
family members of two other victims of the disease at Samsung's
semiconductor manufacturing plant filed for the government to acknowledge
the disease was work-related. They claimed they were exposed to certain
chemicals or substances in the workplace that caused their life-threatening
illnesses.
Samsung Electronics, on the other hand, said the prevalence of non-Hodgkin's
lymphoma among its female staff was 0.82 times lower than the average. ``In
10 years, two were diagnosed with the disease and only one was working on
the manufacturing line. Also, she was cured,'' a spokesman said.
