If you guessed which group had the higher % of those 2.3 million Occupational fatalities, deaths from injuries or deaths from illnesses, I would bet actual money (which I never do) that you would guess wrong.
According to the (link: ILO’s) ILO’s Global Trends on Occupational Accidents and Disease, only14% of the fatalities are from injuries and the remaining 86% are fatal illness cases and the majority of the illnesses are deaths from chemical exposures at work. However, due to the logistics of death occurring outside of the workplace decades later the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not report occupational illness fatality statistics.
The economic burden due to occupational fatalities was roughly 2.8 Trillion dollars worldwide in 2015. We are now not only working with a great many more chemicals in the workplace, but they are present at the nanometer level.
Wait, you say, that makes no sense. You may have been reviewing or completing OSHA 300 logs and have only documented 1 or 2 illness recordables, sometimes in 5-10 years. This is not a surprise. Illness fatalities rarely take place on the job site while falling off a scaffold almost always does.
Occupational illness fatalities often occur decades after the chemical exposure incident. On top of that, some chemicals absorb through skin without causing burns or irritation so that they slip in unnoticed. Where chemical safety habits are sloppy and/or unenforced, such as wearing contaminated gloves outside the work area, plenty of contamination can be left on surfaces such as
- Doorknobs
- Work phones and cell phones
- Paper and clip boards
- pens/pencils
As well as other surfaces touched by hands not wearing the specific chemical resistant gloves.
Once the chemical is absorbed through the skin it makes its way down to, and enters, blood capillaries to get whisked away to the target organ. Due to the sneaky entrance, it is unlikely that a disease such as cancer that first shows symptoms 10 to 25 years later is going to be connected to that initial exposure. That is especially true if a person not working with the chemical was exposed when he touched one of the contaminated objects.
Not only can chemicals cause fatal diseases, but they can also affect the reproductive system (link: reproductive hazards) without the employee noticing the exposure. The effect of reproductive toxins also takes place outside the workplace and is seldom connected to that doorknob or thinned glove material from that too small glove worn while working with the toxin.
Let me give you an example of how far contamination from the exposed person’s hands and shoes can go. I was called out on a complaint about lead exposure at a gun range in the lower level of a local community college when I was in OSHA standard enforcement for the public sector. I brought along colorimetric wipe tests for lead. Getting the gun range supervisor and the college’s Safety Manager together we performed wipe tests in the gun range, every surface tested positive for lead.
The door handles to the stairs tested positive. Every step that was tested showed positive. the door and door handle at the top of the stairs tested positive. The drinking fountain button that released the water was contaminated. The door handles to the outside campus were contaminated. The floor tested positive for contamination on the left side of the hallway for 10 feet into the building.
This is how easy it is to create chemical exposure for employees that work in ‘non-exposure’ jobs. 
