This issue of the journal focuses on occupational injury and features selected papers from the National Occupational Injury Research Symposium (NOIRS) held in Pittsburgh in October 2003 (see p 195 for a commentary on the meeting). Readers might also like to consult the NOIRS website (http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/noirs/noirsmain.html) where there is a list of abstracts from the recent conference and those in 2000 and 1997.

Among the 2003 abstracts is one by Alberg entitled “Reported workplace fatalities: how complete is the picture?” It states “The provincial Workplace Safety and Health Division (WSH), Department of Labour in the province of Manitoba, Canada, has the responsibility for tracking fatalities in all workplaces. The system collects information on both workers and general public who die at, or as the result of, a workplace and its hazards”.

The (non-working) general public in this context are often referred to as “bystanders” and in the Manitoba case are defined as follows: “a person other than a worker who is killed as a result of exposure to a workplace hazard, but who was not working for or in that workplace at the time of death”.¹

An example of a bystander death would be if a member of the public walks past a building site and a piece of scaffolding falls onto them and kills them. In this case the death clearly arose directly as a result of a work process. Capturing deaths such as this in a work related fatal database is very sensible and to be encouraged.

In the hypothetical scaffolding example, presumably implicit in the decision to record the death is the notion that there was fault …