Firefighters’ multiple exposure assessments in practice

Health hazard evaluation report: evaluation of dermal exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in fire fighters.

“…Compared to other studies involving fire fighters [Caux et al 2002;Laitinen et al 2009Laitinen et al , 2012 or topical exposure of PAHs to the skin [VanRooij et al 1993], the apparent faster absorption and excretion rate of PAHs in our study could be due to a variety of factors, including the composition of PAHs produced, extreme environmental conditions of the fires, and that neck skin was the most exposed site of the fire fighters' bodies. The exposure time in our study was also relatively short (≤ 30 minutes).…”

Role of dermal exposure in systemic intake of methylenediphenyl diisocyanate (MDI) among construction and boat building workers

“…This excretion pattern might be an indication of dermal MDI uptake. It is common that dermal exposure can cause a delay in the excretion pattern in comparison to pure inhalation exposure (Bentur et al, 1998;Laitinen et al, 2012). In addition to dermal exposure, the urinary levels may also indicate a two-phase elimination pattern of MDA and a longer half-live of a second phase metabolite, as halflives of about 70 h have been reported for MDI (Dalene et al, 1997).…”

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the firefighter workplace: The results from the first in Poland short-term measuring campaign

“…Since the early 1980s in the United States, and since the beginning of the 21th century in other countries, the firefighter occupational health hazard has been comprehensively studied not only as direct endangerment of life and health in a firefighting situation, but also as a hazard from exposure to hazardous substances, which are often carcinogenic [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Despite the use of personal protection equipment, the danger of exposure of a firefighter to extremely high concentrations of toxic substances is great, and although its duration is usually short, it can be very intense and occur many times in the career of a firefighter.…”

“…Although direct contact with these PAHs and the presence of their metabolites in the organisms of firefighters taking part in firefighting has been proved [e.g. 6,7,10], the linkage of lung cancer incidence among firefighters with their occupation was considered as inconclusively proven for quite a long time [16,17]; and only lately and cautiously, the lung cancer incidence rate among career firefighters was considered essentially higher than in the normal population [4,5,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31].…”