Exposure determinants needed to improve the assessment of exposure

✍ Scribed by Manuel R. Gómez

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 91 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0271-3586
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-0274(199605)29:5<569::aid-ajim18>3.0.co;2-z

✦ Synopsis

The report by Loomis et al. [ 19941 is a valuable example of the growing efforts to improve the exposure assessment that underlies epidemiologic research and other applications of exposure data. A central theme of the report is a description of how the workers were grouped in a manner that would make the exposure data useful to meaningful inferential analysis. One of the occupational groups formed by the authors was "electrical linemen." This group constitutes a substantial proportion of the total person-years in the epidemiologic study reported elsewhere [Savitz and Loomis, 19951, as well as a group with relatively high exposures to many of the agents of concern (their Fig.

I ; Table 111).

A report in a similar population is of direct relevance to this effort, both because it may help refine the exposure assessment for this group of potentially highly exposed workers, and because it illustrates some of the complexities faced when classifying workers into groups with presumably similar exposures [Thind et al., 19911. Thind and his colleagues found that the electrical linemen group was actually made up of rwo distinct subgroups with substantially different exposure profiles (statistically significant). The reason was differences in seniority ("years of work experience") between the subgroups. Put simply, the workers with higher seniority within the occupational group did less of the "dirty work," which in this case was climbing electrical poles. This task was the primary source of dermal exposure to the pentachlorophenol in the treated wood poles. Exposure to magnetic fields may be similarly affected as a result of differences in proximity to the sources.