In this issue of the European Respiratory Journal, DUMAS et al. [1] describe associations between occupational disinfectant exposure and asthma control in US nurses. Asthma control was defined by using the Asthma Control Test (ACT) and based on responses to five questions on activity limitations, frequency of symptoms and frequency of use of quick-relief medication in the past 4 weeks (β-agonis...

BACKGROUND The effects of female occupational exposures on fecundity have not been evaluated in South Africa. The aim of this study was to assess the effects of three specific occupational groups on time-to-pregnancy (TTP). METHODS This cross-sectional study collected data, by means of a questionnaire, on 1210 women representative of a South African population, and sought information on: TTP ...

Dust can be produced by almost all mining operations in underground coal mines and seen all around the mine. Different occupational groups get exposed to different dust levels and in order to minimize the probability of developing coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP), it is necessary to investigate the workers exposed to dust. This study aimed to evaluate the dust concentration conditions in unde...

Respiratory cancer in relation to occupational exposures among retired asbestos workers. A cohort of 1348 men who completed their working lifetime in the asbestos industry and retired with an industry pension during the period 1941-67 was observed through 1969 for deaths. The average length of employment in the asbestos industry for these men was 25 years and all had exposures to asbestos dust....

An exploratory qualitative case study investigated how different sectors of a highly industrialized community mobilized in the 1990s to help workers exposed to asbestos. For this study, thirty key informants including representatives from industry, workers, the community, and local politicians participated in semi-structured interviews and focus groups. The analysis was framed by a "Dimensions ...

Shanghai is the largest industrial centre in China and has a history of about 50 years in producing and applying benzidine derived dyes. A series of epidemiological studies on the carcinogenicity of benzidine and its derived dyes have been performed since 1979. This report describes three such studies. A case-control study was carried out on 344 cases of bladder cancer, each matched for age and...

The recent passage of the Occupational Diseases Prevention and Control Act of 2002 (ODPCAct) in China and the new occupational exposure limits signify the Chinese government's commitment to improve the environment of the workplace and to eradicate preventable occupational diseases. The effectiveness of the ODPCAct, however, will depend on not only implementation and enforcement but also educati...

OBJECTIVE To identify the prevalence of exposure to potentially harmful occupational hazards in Australian female veterinarians and to report factors associated with prevalence of occupational hazards in this profession. DESIGN National cross-sectional survey of a cohort population. PROCEDURE A self-administered questionnaire was mailed to 5748 veterinarians (males and females) graduating f...

The purpose of this study was to estimate the risk of adult asthma in relation to certain occupational exposures. The study was designed as a case-control study in Göteborg, including 321 subjects with asthma, born between 1926 and 1970. Controls (n=1,459) were randomly selected from the same area from registers of the 1986 population. Questionnaire information was collected in 1996, and includ...

BACKGROUND The reliability of binary exposure classification methods is routinely reported in occupational health literature because it is viewed as an important component of evaluating the trustworthiness of the exposure assessment by experts. The Kappa statistics (κ) are typically employed to assess how well raters or classification systems agree in a variety of contexts, such as identifying ...