TY - JOUR T1 - Into ploughshares: forging effective surveillance for work-related lung disease JF - Occupational and Environmental Medicine JO - Occup Environ Med SP - 783 LP - 784 DO - 10.1136/oemed-2019-105787 VL - 76 IS - 11 AU - Carl J Reynolds AU - Paul Blanc Y1 - 2019/11/01 UR - http://oem.bmj.com/content/76/11/783.abstract N2 - This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Surveillance of Work-related and Occupational Respiratory Disease (SWORD) programme, the voluntary scheme for surveillance originally established at the National Heart and Lung Institute in London in January 1989. The SWORD surveillance programme has enjoyed ongoing support from the British Thoracic Society, the Society of Occupational Medicine and the UK governmental Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Currently, SWORD is hosted by the University of Manchester. At its inception, the stated objectives of the SWORD scheme were to monitor the frequency of work-related respiratory disease, promote early recognition and control, provide feedback to participating reporters and undertake collaborative investigations.1 Thus, although technically a passive rather than a mandated reporting scheme, from the start, SWORD was not intended merely to be a dead-end receiver of reports.In its first year alone, 2101 cases were reported through SWORD by 354 chest and 361 occupational physicians covering a wide mix of cases: asthma (26%); mesothelioma (16%); pneumoconiosis (15%); benign pleural disease (11%) and allergic alveolitis (6%).1 Moreover, initial uptake was good, with 83% of respiratory physicians … ER -