Abstract

Interventions are very common in workplaces mainly to improve productivity and efficiencies, but also in order to comply with regulatory requirements (environmental and occupational) and to improve the health of workers. Consequently, exposure to chemical agents, at least in Western Europe and the US, have declined in the last 4–5 decades. However, there is a remarkable paucity of properly conducted intervention studies in occupational health, in particular in relation to chemical and biological agents and their health outcomes. As a result, we don’t have a very good understanding of what interventions actually work to reduce exposure and to improve the health of workers. Very wide estimates of the effectiveness of control measures have been noted from observational studies, probably because only few studies were probably conducted and many studies just compared the exposure between workplaces with and without the intervention. However, there is an important role for properly conducted intervention studies to reduce exposure and improve occupational health, and results of properly designed intervention studies will lead to a better understanding of causality as well as better understanding of effective interventions.