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Annals of Occupational Hygiene Advance Access published online on August 26, 2005

Annals of Occupational Hygiene, doi:10.1093/annhyg/mei035
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© 2005 British Occupational Hygiene Society
Received February 2, 2005
Accepted June 20, 2005

Article

A Database of Exposures in the Rubber Manufacturing Industry: Design and Quality Control

Frank de Vocht 1, Kurt Straif 2, N. Szeszenia-Dabrowska 3, Lars Hagmar 4, Tom Sorahan 5, Igor Burstyn 6, Roel Vermeulen 7, and Hans Kromhout 1* {dagger}

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 Environmental and Occupational Health Division, Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands; Department of Public Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, The University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
7 Environmental and Occupational Health Division, Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands; Occupational Epidemiology Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Hans Kromhout, E-mail: H.Kromhout{at}IRAS.uu.nl


   Abstract

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 ({kappa}) 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 {kappa} between 0.86 and 1.00. For occupational hygiene information, values of {kappa} 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.


{dagger}The EU-EXASRUB consortium: F. Baarslag (deceased 25 July 2004), K. H. Bedemann, U. Bergendorf, I. Burstyn, A. A. Dost, L. Hagmar, M. Heise, K. Jakobsson, B. Jonsson, C. L. Kenmore, H. Kromhout, L. Nichols, B. Peplonska, W. Sobala, T. Sorahan, K. Straif, P. Swuste, N. Szeszenia-Dabrowska, D. Taeger, R. Vermeulen and F. G. de Vocht.
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