[Causality in occupational health: the Ardystil case]

Establishing causal relationships has been and is today a matter of debate in epidemiology. The observational nature of epidemiological research rends difficult the proving of these relationships. Related to this, different models and causal criteria have been proposed in order to explain health and disease determinants, from pure determinism in Koch postulates, accepting unicausal explanation for diseases, to more realistic multicausal models. In occupational health it is necessary to formulate causal models and criteria to assess causality, and frequently causal assessment in this field has important social, economic and juridical relevance. This paper deal with evaluation of causal relationships in epidemiology and this evaluation is illustrated with a recent example of an occupational health problem in our milieu: the Ardystil case.