Annals of Occupational Hygiene Advance Access published online on June 15, 2006
Annals of Occupational Hygiene, doi:10.1093/annhyg/mel031
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1 Centre for International Health, University of Bergen, Norway; Section for Occupational Medicine, Department for Public Health and Primary Health Care, University of Bergen, Norway; Department of Community Health, Muhimbili University College of Health Sciences
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. This study aims at estimating variability in exposure to respirable dust and assessing whether the a priori grouping by job team is appropriate for an exposure-response study on respiratory effects among workers in a manually operated coal mine in Tanzania. Furthermore, estimated exposure levels were used to calculate cumulative exposure. Full-shift personal respirable dust samples (n = 204) were collected from 141 randomly chosen workers at underground and surface work sites. The geometric mean exposure for respirable dust varied from 0.07 mg m-3 for office workers to 1.96 mg m-3 for the development team. The analogous range of respirable quartz exposure was 0.006-0.073 mg m-3. Variance components were estimated using random effect models. For most job teams the within-worker variance component was considerably higher than the between-worker variance component. For respirable dust the estimated attenuation of the linear exposure-response relationship was low (5.9%) when grouping by job team. Grouping by job team was considered appropriate for studying the association between current dust exposure and respiratory effects. Based on the estimated worker-specific mean exposure in the job teams, the arithmetic mean cumulative exposure for the 299 workers who participated in the epidemiological part of the study was 38.1 mg • yr m-3 for respirable dust and 2.0 mg • yr m-3 for quartz.
Received October 11, 2005
Accepted April 4, 2006
Article
Variability of Exposure and Estimation of Cumulative Exposure in a Manually Operated Coal Mine
Simon H. D. Mamuya 1 *,
Magne Bråtveit 2,
Julius Mwaiselage 3,
and
Bente E. Moen 2
2 Section for Occupational Medicine, Department for Public Health and Primary Health Care, University of Bergen, Norway
3 Cancer Prevention Division, Ocean Road Cancer Institute, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Simon H. D. Mamuya, E-mail: mamuyasimon{at}yahoo.com
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