Spotlight on workplace safety in Italy amid spate of fatal accidents

Call for tougher safety measures and closure of firms that fail to comply after 677 deaths from January to July

Two technicians are believed to have died of suffocation in the basement of a university hospital near Milan amid a spate of fatal workplace accidents in Italy.

The men, aged 46 and 42, had been loading a tank of liquid nitrogen used to preserve medical samples when the accident happened on Tuesday morning. Early investigations show they may have suffocated before becoming frozen by the leaked liquid nitrogen, which is stored at temperatures below -196C