Cancer impacts health of American economy

Cancer among American workers costs a businesses where they work billions of dollars a year in mislaid productivity, new investigate finds.

A investigate led by Grant Skrepnek of a University of Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson suggested that cancer in U.S. employees formula in some-more than 33 million incapacity days per year, that amounts to $7.5 billion in lostÂ productivity. Based on information from 2004 to 2008, a researchers guess that 3.3 million American workers are diagnosed with cancer annually.

The investigate shows smaller businesses are many affected.Â Of a workers with cancer that were analyzed, scarcely 85 percent worked for companies with fewer than 500 employees. In addition, these small-business employees who had cancer were also some-more expected to be uninsured and had aloft rates of otherÂ health problems, such as high blood pressure, basin and ongoing opposed pulmonary disease.

The research, one of a initial to request a mercantile impact ofÂ canceron a U.S. workforce, suggested that certain forms of cancers, including women’s cancers and melanoma, were compared with aloft burdens of illness. For breast cancer, health caring costs and hospitalizations were twice as high and incapacity days 55 percent aloft than for other cancers.

The study’s authors trust a loyal cost in terms of mislaid capability is expected even aloft than a incapacity days measured. Based on a results, they call for serve efforts to revoke a weight of illness compared with cancer and a treatment.

The investigate was published in this month’s book of a Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, a central announcement of a American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.