FIREFIGHTERS must “draw a line in the sand against flat-Earthers” in Downing Street and at the top of fire-and-rescue services who are still ignoring the overwhelming evidence revealing a link between fire-fighting and cancer, their union said today.

Delegates at the Fire Brigades Union’s (FBU) 2023 conference in Blackpool overwhelmingly backed a series of resolutions which demanded routine health monitoring of all front-line staff across the emergency service.

The call came after ground-breaking FBU-commissioned research by the University of Central Lancashire (UClan) earlier this year revealed that firefighters are dying of cancer at 1.6 times the rate of the general population, while those aged 35-39 are three times more likely to have the disease than others.

The union’s well-established campaign for the kind of “presumptive compensation legislation” which is already the norm in the US, Australia and Canada, were also boosted last year when the World Health Organisation declared firefighting is carcinogenic or cancer-causing.

Delegate Barry Jackson urged bosses to deliver on their “moral obligation” to protect the essential workforce.

“Let’s draw a line in the sand and say no more,” he said to applause in the coastal city’s Imperial Hotel.

His Tyne and Wear colleague Wayne Anderson said that regular health monitoring was “easy and achievable and it’s almost criminal that we’re not doing it already.”

FBU national officer Riccardo de la Torre slammed as “perverse” the fact that the union is having to fund its own research into the serious occupational hazards facing firefighters while Tory ministers, fire chiefs and employers still “deny the evidence they are being inundated with.

“We are sick and tired of being told that we’re out of step with the rest of the world on this — there is absolutely no need to be,” he said.

“Firefighters are dying far too young and far too often and fire bosses are asleep at the wheel on an issue that is killing us.”

He spoke before Professor Anna Stec — lead researcher on the UClan project — was awarded an FBU solidarity medal.

In a rousing speech, the Polish-born academic thanked the union for the “prestigious” honour and predicted that routine health monitoring for firefighters is now inevitable following the FBU’s tireless work.

Many speakers also praised the union’s innovative Decon campaign, which is putting pressure on bosses to improve the often basic and sometimes non-existent decontamination facilities available in fire stations.