Abstract
Occupational health is shaped by a complex set of occupational exposures and their determinants occurring throughout the life course. The assessment of occupational exposure to a chemical hazard is a complex process, which ideally results in an estimate of internal dose integrated over the exposure duration throughout the individual’s professional carrier. However, in practice, existing data rarely allow such an assessment. Job-exposure matrices – or JEMs – established for one or several chemical hazards present a valid alternative, enabling assessment of chemical exposure per job, or homogeneous group of workers at company, or industry, or on the population level.
This chapter presents the principles and main constrains in exposure assessment for chemical hazards and summarizes the most common strategies and methods. JEM approach is presented in more details, to emphasize the methodological improvement achieved over the last four decades and chemicals for which the exposure has been assessed using JEMs. An illustrative example of a plant-specific JEM constructed for the nuclear industry emphasizes the JEMs’ usefulness in occupational health research, and particularly in the estimation of the dose-response relationship with health outcomes. Finally, the use of JEMs for emergent exposures is discussed, along with potential extension of JEM approach to improve the exposure assessment to chemicals in the constantly changing world.
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Guseva Canu, I. (2023). Chemical Hazards at Work and Occupational Diseases Using Job-Exposure Matrices. In: Wahrendorf, M., Chandola, T., Descatha, A. (eds) Handbook of Life Course Occupational Health. Handbook Series in Occupational Health Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30492-7_4
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