Dr. Gassert is board certified in Occupational & Environmental Medicine (OEM) and Internal Medicine, and has worked as an Occupational (Industrial) Hygienist. He has been an instructor and a professor of medicine at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Boston University, and University of Massachusetts, and staff member of their affiliated hospitals. Since 1995, he has been with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the OEM residency program and in continuing education for industrial hygienists. His main interest is education in OEM and hygiene.
His work experience has included worker injuries and illnesses, medical surveillance, disability cases, work-site investigations, and medical-legal cases as expert witness. He has consulted in construction, mining, electronics, garments, pharmaceuticals, and other manufacturing and service industries, including hospitals and healthcare work and biomedical research on infectious disease.
He has visited and at times worked in Asia-Pacific region since 1975. While in Hong Kong 1980-1985 he authored a detailed handbook on health hazards in electronics manufacturing. He has published on occupational asthma and on toxicology of the 1984 gassing incident at Bhopal, India, the world’s worst industrial disaster. During 2020-21, he has advised extensively on SARS-2 pandemic prevention and response as an occupational disease.
In Asia and Africa, Dr. Gassert has conducted training in OEM, nursing, hygiene and safety in Thailand, China mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Mongolia, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, South Korea, Cambodia and Lao PDR, Fiji Islands, South Africa, Saudi Arabia. This has included technical expert service to the U.N. WHO Western Pacific Region to consult and to conduct basic occupational health services (BOHS) training, and to help develop a WPR initiative for a five-year 2020-2025 Action Plan for Workers’ Health to achieve Universal Occupational Health Coverage in line with the UN SDG-8 for Decent Work.
The global burden of disease (GBD) attributable to occupational and environmental health (OEH) risks is rapidly changing as traditional definitions of estimates must now account for the large and rapidly worsening impacts on working conditions of permanent manmade climate change and the hideous global SARS-2 (COVID-19) pandemic. Climate is now a global crisis of children’s rights, our future workforce, and already poses serious worker health and safety challenges due to heat, drought, massive fires, floods, severe storms, sea rise, infectious disease outbreaks, human migration, civil strife, and wars. Most pronounced perhaps is the impact and downstream effects on migrant workers and refugees looking for work, within and among nations. The COVID-19 pandemic is also an occupational disease (OD) of widespread death and disruption for workers and their families, as well as to businesses. Indeed, our home, the Earth itself, is in peril if we do not integrate and align OEH practices with a farsighted view to protect Planetary Health, not just of humans, but of the natural world that sustains us.
More locally, each day reports of preventable industrial disasters fill the news media, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). While examples abound of excellent technical and legal remedies, we cannot survive if we do not collaborate globally and locally within a framework and vision that protects the homeland, our planet and its resources and ecosystems. This will require a paradigm shift from current socioeconomic industrial practices that are based on exploitation more than restoration of natural and human resources.
How do we grasp a practical sense of our individual roles in collectively achieving a brighter, more just and healthier future for the world’s 7.8 billion people, and for its projected 11 billion in the year 2100 when newborns today reach age 80? Now, 62% (age 15+) of the global population work, nearly half of them in Asia and the Pacific. The 10 worst CO2-emitting nations, including China, USA, Russia and Japan (with exception of India) suffer the least impact, whereas 33 of the poorest nations emit the least amount of CO2 yet are suffering the most from climate change. COVID-19 vaccines have barely reached 17% of the world’s people, and the virulence of emerging variants requires a minimum of 85-90% herd immunity to drive down the pandemic.
Globally, only about 20% of workers on average have access to basic occupational health services (BOHS), and most who do have access reside in wealthier nations. BOHS includes occupational hygiene and safety services, and hazard controls, which is “where the money is” for smart industries, large and small. The global response to the pandemic has shown us that in the face of disaster that knows no boundaries, we can unite and respond effectively. Remedies are discoverable and can work if applied broadly and equitably. We have learned so much from the SARS-2 pandemic that can be applied in many areas of OSH practice. Similarly, there are many remedies for climate change mitigation. And, if we seriously address the burden of OD for workers, with a truthful vision to achieve clean, safe and environmentally sustainable industries and jobs, this itself would go a long way to help mitigate manmade climate change and to restore planetary health. So, why is there not a global collaborative movement by industry leaders, employers and investors toward a “vision zero” for occupational diseases?
We have the answers and the means. There is still a chance for human and planetary survival. But do we have the will, individually and collectively? Collective action breeds hope and inspires. It requires more than technology. It requires a symphony of applied systems, a new renaissance of industrial designs and practices. But this can only work if done in the context of a global code of ethics, equity and justice that does no harm and leaves no one behind.
What is the framework within which to see our individual and collective roles when it comes to eliminating poverty, achieving basic health services for all including workers, providing productive, safe, decent work, and mitigating the devastating effects of climate change? There are four key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 1, 3, 8 and 13) for 2030 endorsed by the UN in 2015 that are directly pertinent to the practice of occupational hygiene and safety as experts in primary prevention of occupational disease: SDG-1 eliminate poverty; SDG-3 universal health coverage; SDG-8 decent productive work for all; and SDG-13 climate change mitigation. The ILO has also provided key OSH and OHS framework guidance for all 193 UN member states.
Recently, member states of the UN Western Pacific Region, convened an initiative to generate both regional and national occupational health profiles, and defined the term Universal Occupational Health Coverage (UOHC) as a critical component not clearly stated in SDG-3 (universal health coverage), for without recognizing the explicit need for BOHS, SDG-3 cannot be achieved. Foundational to UOHC and BOHS is a standard legal framework, recognition of the ILO classification of occupational diseases as ICD-10 diagnoses, adoption of global hazard exposure standards and hazard communication, and training of hygienists and safety professionals, nurses and doctors in the practice of OEH, disaster prevention, and infectious disease – all with a view eventually to generate centers of OHS and OEH excellence in public health institutions and medical schools so that eventually each nation or local region can be self-sustaining in hazard controls, worker health services and environmental protection.
By integrating our existing and evolving skills, and inspiring our collective wills, to apply remedies learned from the global burden of OD, and from the climate and pandemic challenges, we can formulate a roadmap to achieve the 2030 SDGs for UOHC and BOHS for all workers that also realizes during this next generation of our children a “great transition” needed to preserve planetary health. It falls to us, to the OEH and safety design professionals to lead the way – now. As the Swedish child activist for climate Greta Thunberg said of today’s adults, “The eyes of all future generations are on you.” It will be very exciting if we can organize our efforts and collectively meet this greatest challenge of our time – worker and planetary health!