Background-Angiosarcoma of the liver (ASL) has been described in vinyl chloride workers worldwide. Aim-To describe the UK experience of occupationally related ASL. Patients-Twenty patients who died from ASL after exposure to vinyl chloride. Methods-The case records and pathological findings of these 20 patients were reviewed.
The incidence of Dupuytren's contracture in a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) manufacturing plant, where a great deal of bagging and packing took place by hand, was higher than that in another plant in which there was no bagging or packing. The fellow workers were similarly affected. We therefore decided to investigate the incidence of Dupuytren's contracture in workers engaged in the bagging and packing of PVC.
ProcessThe bagging and packing process was formerly carried out as follows. PVC compound was packed into 25-kg sacks on a semi-automatic packing line. (These sacks were made of 3-ply paper and measured roughly 810 mm x 460 mm, with a 100-mm gusset. The base was capped and sewn, and the mouth was open with fine serrated edges.) The open mouth was placed over the filling point, held in place with clamps, and the bag was automatically filled and then dropped from the filling point. A worker grasped the top of the sack at each side and pressed the gussets together. He pulled the top of the sack taut and directed the leading edge into and through the stitcher guide, keeping the top taut and vertical. The stitched bags were then transferred by hand several yards to a palletiser. In a recent modification of the process the sacks, after automatic filling, drop off the filling point on to a conveyor and thence to a stitching machine; the stitched bags are transferred by conveyor to the palletiser thus making manual work unnecessary.
MethodsThe entire population of 216 male workers in the bagging and packing plant was studied; 84 male workers in another plant in which no bagging or packing took place were taken as a control population. A questionnaire was used to record each man's name, date of birth, present occupation (including the starting date), and his occupational history. In 98
could be produced in rats by levels of exposure that were appreciably less than those that had previously occurred in industry.4 Steps were therefore quickly taken in the mid-1970s to reduce the extent to which individuals could be exposed from levels of the order of several hundred ppm to 5 ppm (13 x 106 ngm/m3) or less.5 This reduction followed
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