The annual occupational disease report for Connecticut was released to the public on Sept. 1. It has been the responsibility of one man for the past 25 years: Tim Morse, professor emeritus in Occupational and Environmental Medicine and the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Connecticut.
The occupational disease report showcases a tally of every recorded instance of occupational disease in the state of Connecticut for the year 2023. Occupational disease can include anything from musculoskeletal conditions to infectious disease, among other things.
The data organized within the report is sourced from three databases: Workers’ Compensation First Report of Injury cases, Physician Report of Occupational Disease under the Occupational Illnesses and Injury Surveillance System and the Bureau of Labor Statistics/Connecticut Department of Labor Annual Survey.
“Doctors don’t get paid to find out where diseases come from,” Morse said. Instead, Morse said they are paid to treat them. As such, the Connecticut occupational disease report seeks to investigate the origin of disease that affects a large portion of the population: workers.
The production of this report came out of a public act. As a result, UConn and Yale receive funding in order to support the creation of these reports every year. Its production relies on the collaboration between occupational health clinics, the Workers Compensation Commission and the Department of Labor.
These institutions provide and organize the raw data independently of each other, so it is up to Morse to hash all of the information together. He said this process can be quite involved.
Sometimes an incident will be reported to two different institutions or just one of them, according to Morse. As a result, sometimes the different databases make it appear as if there are more instances of occupational disease than there really are, as the same case can be reported twice.
In order to create more accurate data, Morse said he employs capture/recapture analysis, a method of research popular among ecologists, to estimate the net number of reported cases.
Sorting through and making sense of this raw data takes the most time, according to Morse.
“The data is difficult to interpret,” Morse said. “You can’t tell what’s a change in exposure or a change in reporting.”
The demographic with the most incidents is the government sector, which includes police, firefighters and healthcare workers.
The government sector has the highest number of incidents because of several factors, according to Morse. Morse says government jobs tend to be unionized, have good reporting, good healthcare and high awareness of occupational disease.
The goal of this supplemental report would be to summarize the available literature in a way that makes it accessible to people without making it seem every occupation is at risk for everything
Tim Morse, UConn Professor of Community Medicine
Many instances of blood-borne disease exposure actually come from human bites, Morse said. Physicians are required by law to report bites to the Occupational Illnesses and Injury Surveillance System. Workers from the Department of Children and Families, as well as corrections officers, are the most prone to bites according to the report.
The report showed that some towns had many more incidents than others, and they weren’t in the cities. Vernon, Meriden, East Hampton, Westbrook and Groton had the highest numbers for varied reasons. Groton, for instance, is home to General Dynamics Electric Boat, a submarine construction facility that has supplied the U.S. Navy for over a century. Morse said 193 of the 227 cases reported in the town came from submarine building.
Morse expressed a desire to publish a supplemental report along with the main occupational disease report for next year.
“The goal of this supplemental report would be to summarize the available literature in a way that makes it accessible to people without making it seem every occupation is at risk for everything,” Morse said.
Morse said that there are obstacles to getting this report published.
“Funding agencies are small and getting cut under [the Trump] administration,” Morse said. “There’s not much research as a result.”