LETTER
Respiratory cancer in nickel carbonyl refinery workers
1 Institute of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B14 2TT, UK; T.M.Sorahan@bham.ac.uk
2 Inco Europe Ltd, Clydach Refinery, Swansea, UK
Keywords: lung cancer; nasal cancer; nickel
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Grimsrud and Peto1 have usefully compared our recent findings of respiratory cancer risks in nickel carbonyl refinery workers first employed at the Clydach plant in the period 1953–922 with those of earlier year-of-hire cohorts.3 We did highlight the elevated SMR for nasal cancer in our study but epidemiological interpretation is not possible given that it is based on a single death. Our caution is perhaps also justified by the fact that hospital records indicate that this case was a pharyngeal tumour extending into the nasal cavities rather than a nasal primary tumour. Grimsrud and Peto appear to approve of our suggestions that retrospective exposure assessment needs to be improved and that recent studies of other nickel exposed workers need to be pooled. We do not, however, approve of their summary of our own conclusions. We are reported to have concluded that the non-significant lung cancer excess "may well be a
3 Cancer Registry of Norway, Institute of Population-based Cancer Research, Oslo, Norway; tom.k.grimsrud@kreftregisteret.no
4 London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK
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