EDITORIALS
Assessing workplace exposures: turning to the past for guidance
Correspondence to:
Prof. S M Rappaport, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-7356, USA; smr@unc.edu
Keywords: exposure; exposure-response; lognormal; peaks; strategies
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
It will probably surprise many readers of this Journal to know that occupational exposures to chemicals are rarely assessed with quantitative data, either for epidemiology or for control of hazardous conditions. Only about 13% of epidemiology studies published in the 1980s, on the aetiology of chronic diseases, used any exposure measurements,1 and even those tended to rely on trivial sample sizes (median n = 4).2 Thus, uncertainty in exposure levels is the largest source of error in defining exposure–response relationships. Likewise, industrial surveys of air contaminants typically obtain only a single air measurement per occupational group.3 Surprisingly, this was not always the case. In the period between 1920 and 1960, engineers and health professionals routinely collected many air samples from a given working population, despite the primitive state of measurement technology.4–7 The likely motivation for such effort was the tremendous variability of air concentrations observed over time and among locations;
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
-
Loomis, D.
(2009). Sixty-five years of the Journal go online. Occup. Environ. Med.
66: 425-426
[Full Text]
- Full Text
- Full Text (PDF)
- Submit a response
- Alert me when this article is cited
- Alert me when eLetters are posted
- Alert me if a correction is posted
- Citation Map
Services
- Email this link to a friend
- Similar articles in this journal
- Similar articles in PubMed
- Add article to my folders
- Download to citation manager
- Request Permissions
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Topic Collections
Bookmark with
Register for free content
The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.
Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.
