OBJECTIVE Emergency workers, such as fire-fighters, are routinely exposed to potentially traumatic events. While a number of studies have examined the occurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder, the role of multiple traumas on other mental health sequelae, such as depression and alcohol misuse, among emergency workers remains unclear. This study aimed to assess the prevalence of post-traumati...

BACKGROUND The healthy worker effect may hide adverse health effects in hazardous jobs, especially those where physical fitness is required. Fire fighters may serve as a good example because they sometimes are severely exposed to hazardous substances while on the other hand their physical fitness and their strong health surveillance by far exceeds that of comparable persons from the general pop...

BACKGROUND Clinimetric data for the fire fighting simulation test (FFST), a new test proposed for the Workers' Health Surveillance (WHS) of Dutch fire fighters, were evaluated. METHODS Twenty-one fire fighters took the FFST three times with one and three weeks between testing. Clinimetric quality was determined by means of reliability, agreement and validity. For reliability and agreement, th...

A case is reported in which computer fire modeling was used to reevaluate a fire that killed three fire fighters. NIST's Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) was employed to model the fire in order to estimate the concentration of carbon monoxide present in the dwelling, which was the immediate cause of death of two of the fire fighters, who appear to have removed their face pieces in order to share a...

OBJECTIVE To review the causes of all fire fighter line-of-duty-deaths from 1998 through 2001, and present recommendations for preventing fatalities within the specific subgroup of structure related events. METHODS Fire fighter fatality data from the United States Fire Administration were reviewed and classified into three main categories of injury. Investigations conducted through the Nation...

The study determined physiological and psychophysical responses to fire fighters' typical activities. Self-reported assessment of the most demanding fire fighting/rescue tasks were collected with a questionnaire. Then 19 voluntary fire fighters performed 3 simulated fire fighting/rescue tasks in protective clothing. Heart rate (HR), blood pressure and energy expenditure were measured; the ratin...

Fire fighters are normally overprotected during their working hours because of the tendency to keep the personal protection level sufficiently high in case of the worst possible scenarios. This study investigated the effects of task-fitted protective clothing on thermal strain in fire fighters as compared to EN 469:2005 protective clothing during a prolonged (2 1/2 hrs) job-related rescue drill...

BACKGROUND Associations between job stresses, as assessed by theoretical job stress model and depressive symptoms among fire fighters have not been fully investigated. The purpose of this study is to clarify the factors of job stress that influence the depressive symptoms in Japanese fire fighters. METHODS The subjects involved 1,672 fire fighters from a local government. The questionnaire co...

OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was to test the feasibility and acceptability of a new workers' health surveillance (WHS) for fire fighters in a Dutch pilot-implementation project. METHODS In three fire departments, between November 2007 and February 2009, feasibility was tested with respect to i) worker intent to change health and behavior; ii) the quality of instructions for testing ...