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Judgments No occupational disease due to toner dust pollution
Asthma is not an occupational disease just because workers have inhaled toner dust from laser printers and copiers for years. For there are currently no sufficiently clear findings that toner dust causes specific health problems such as bronchial asthma, the Bavarian State Social Court (LSG) in Munich ruled in a recently published ruling (Ref .: L 3 U 385/14).
The claimant was a woman who worked as a bank clerk from 1992 to 1999. During her work, she repeatedly breathed in toner dust from the laser printers and copiers used in the bank. When bankers were diagnosed with asthma, they attributed this to dust pollution at the workplace.
Allergies in the workplace can also occur in the office, for example, against printer materials and copiers. However, allergic reactions to toner components are probably rare. (Image: lenets_tan / fotolia.com) Therefore, she wanted to have recognized her illness as an occupational disease. She referred to an immunoassay that revealed a "possible inflammatory hypersensitivity reaction" to toner dust constituents.
The LSG did not recognize asthma as an occupational disease. The toner dust was not the cause of the disease. Rather, this is conditioned by other, external factors and thus "fateful".
For the recognition as an occupational disease must be "almost certainly" proven that the health damage caused by the toner dust. According to a court-appointed expert opinion, such evidence does not exist despite numerous medical studies on toner dust pollution, the LSG emphasized in its judgment of 24 May 2016.
In another case, the Oberverwaltungsgericht (OVG) North Rhine-Westphalia in Münster ruled on July 8, 2016, that a so-called contact dermatitis due to toner dust pollution can not justify a "service accident" to a tax official (Ref .: 3 A 3510/13; JurAgentur Message dated 12 July 2016). The probability of a disease is not higher than inflammatory skin reactions in other occupations. fle / mwo / fle