Annals of Occupational Hygiene Advance Access originally published online on August 26, 2005
Annals of Occupational Hygiene 2005 49(8):691-701; doi:10.1093/annhyg/mei035
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© 2005 British Occupational Hygiene Society Published by Oxford University Press
Original Article |
A Database of Exposures in the Rubber Manufacturing Industry: Design and Quality Control
1 Environmental and Occupational Health Division, Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands; 2 IARC, Lyon, France; 3 Nofer Institute of Occupational Medicine, Lodz, Poland; 4 Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Lund University Hospital, Lund, Sweden; 5 Institute of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK; 6 Department of Public Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, The University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada; 7 Occupational Epidemiology Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +31-30-253-9440; fax: +31-30-253-9499; e-mail: H.Kromhout{at}IRAS.uu.nl
The concerted action EXASRUB was initiated to create a database management system for information on occupational hygiene measurements that could be used to develop exposure models in the European rubber manufacturing industry. Quality of coding was assessed by calculating percentages of agreement and Cohen's kappa statistics (
) for an intra- and inter-centre recoding of randomly selected subsets of the measurements. In a 6-month period, 59 609 measurements from 523 surveys in 333 factories from as early as 1956 to 2003 were coded. The database consists primarily of measurements of N-nitrosamines (36%), rubber dust (23%), solvents (14%) and rubber fumes (10%). Coding of epidemiologically relevant information was done consistently with inter-centre between 0.86 and 1.00. For occupational hygiene information, values of were estimated to be between 0.67 and 1.00. The proposed method resulted in a large quantity of exposure measurements with auxiliary information of varying completeness and quality. Analyses showed that coding of epidemiologically relevant information in such a multi-centre, multi-country study was coded consistently. Larger errors however, occurred in coding of occupational hygiene information. This was primarily caused by lack of information in the primary records of measurements, emphasizing the importance of having a universal system in place to collect and store measurement information by occupational hygienists for future use.
Keywords: database • data quality • exposure assessment • multi-centre study • rubber manufacturing industry
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