By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter

Female workers at semiconductor manufacturing plants operated by Samsung Electronics and Hynix Semiconductor are five times as likely to get non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the government said Monday.

However, the alleged direct relation between these work environments and the disease has yet to be confirmed, the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency (KOSHA) said.

According to the agency's study of health insurance and other medical records of semiconductor plant workers over the past 10 years, the likelihood of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma among female workers on the manufacturing line was 5.16 times higher than the regular population. Moreover, the prevalence among overall female workers there was 2.67 times higher than men's, a significant difference in working conditions.

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a type of cancer derived from lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell, and aggressive forms of the disease can be fatal without treatment.

However, the agency said the correlation between the working environment and leukemia was unclear. The chances of males getting leukemia or cancer was lower than average, while among females, the chances of dying from the disease were 1.48 times higher than normal, which could be considered insignificant, Park Jung-sun, the KOSHA spokesman, said.

``Ten years is not enough time to track cause and effect between a disease and the environment and we have yet to find out if patients were affected by other factors such as smoking,'' Park said, delaying further speculation.

The research is the first of its kind here to verify whether working environments of such factories actually trigger certain diseases.

The study kicked off a year ago when two leukemia patients and bereaved family members of two other victims of the disease at Samsung's semiconductor manufacturing plant filed for the government to acknowledge the disease was work-related. They claimed they were exposed to certain chemicals or substances in the workplace that caused their life-threatening illnesses.

Samsung Electronics, on the other hand, said the prevalence of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma among its female staff was 0.82 times lower than the average. ``In 10 years, two were diagnosed with the disease and only one was working on the manufacturing line. Also, she was cured,'' a spokesman said.

bjs@koreatimes.co.kr