Study to assess breast cancer risk for female firefighters

Firefighters are exposed to flame retardants,
diesel exhaust and other toxic chemicals,
which may affect their health.

When firefighters rush out the firehouse doors, sirens screeching on the way to fight fires, they put their lives on the line in more ways than one.

In responding to roughly 28,000 fire calls a year, members of the San Francisco Fire Department are routinely exposed to flame retardants, diesel exhaust and other toxic chemicals that seep out of raging infernos and work their way into the air.

A growing body of evidence strongly suggests that exposure increases firefighters’ risk of developing cancer. But until now, studies have focused on men.

That’s about to change. Members of the San Francisco Fire Department are working with researchers at UC Berkeley, UCSF and the Silent Spring Institute to find out whether exposure to toxic chemicals increases the risks of breast cancer in female firefighters.

The project, known as the Women Firefighters Biomonitoring Collaborative Study, has been under way for about a year.

“Since breast cancer is a cancer that more commonly affects women, and because of anecdotal evidence that the firefighters have been experiencing (many cases of breast cancer), we wanted to see if there was a link,” said Jessica Trowbridge, a UC Berkeley researcher who is coordinating the study.

Trowbridge and her colleagues are gathering blood and urine samples from about 160 women — 80 San Francisco firefighters and 80 city office workers who will serve as the control group — to use in measuring chemical, hormone and melatonin levels.

They will also measure the lengths of the women’s telomeres, caps on the ends of chromosomes that are associated with aging and cancer, also thought to be related to chemical exposure and working demanding night shifts.

Firefighters in general have higher rates of cancer, especially respiratory, digestive and urinary system varieties, a recent National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health study found.

That study included women, but there weren't enough of them to draw robust conclusions about their cancer risks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

With about 225 female firefighters, San Francisco is better equipped than most cities for a study like this: Women make up about 13 percent of its firefighting population, said Heather Buren, a lieutenant and paramedic with the fire department who is working on the study.

In 2011, less than 5 percent of firefighters nationwide were women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Researchers will also test for other chemicals that could contribute to higher rates of cancer in both groups of women, who are probably exposed to personal care and household products as well.

There has been a cultural shift with respect to chemical exposure. For one, firefighters now have better breathing masks, which they’re encouraged to wear for longer periods of time in toxic environments.

There are also rules prohibiting members of the department from storing their turnouts — the suits they wear to fight fires — in firehouse rooms where they eat and sleep.

The San Francisco Firefighters Cancer Prevention Foundation, which organizes screenings and promotes cancer prevention in the department, is partially responsible for those changes. It was formed in 2006 by Tony Stefani, a retired firefighter who himself fought cancer.

Researchers have nearly finished enrolling participants for the breast cancer study. They hope to have results published in two years. The women who participate in the study will be able to see their individual results when they are complete.

Source: San Francisco Gate. This article has been edited for length.

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Long term night shifts linked to doubling of breast cancer risk

Working night shifts for 30 or more years doubles the risk of developing breast cancer, and is not confined to nurses as previous research has indicated, finds a study published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Shift work has been suggested as a risk factor for breast cancer, but there has been some doubt about the strength of the findings, largely because of issues around the assessment of exposure and the failure to capture the diversity of shift work patterns. Several previous studies have also been confined to nurses rather than the general population.

In this study, the researchers assessed whether night shifts were linked to an increased risk of breast cancer among 1134 women with breast cancer and 1179 women without the disease, but of the same age, in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Kingston, Ontario.

The women, who had done various different jobs, were asked about their shift work patterns over their entire work history; hospital records were used to determine tumour type.

This may be important, say the authors, because risk factors vary according to hormone sensitivity, and the sleep hormone melatonin, disruption to which has been implicated in higher breast cancer risk among night shift workers, may boost oestrogen production.

Around one in three women in both groups had worked night shifts. There was no evidence that those who had worked nights for up to 14 years or between 15 and 29 years had any increased risk of developing breast cancer.

But those who had worked nights for 30 or more years were twice as likely to have developed the disease, after taking account of potentially influential factors, although the numbers in this group were comparatively small.

The associations were similar among those who worked in healthcare and those who did not. Risk was also higher among those whose tumours were sensitive to oestrogen and progesterone.

The suggested link between breast cancer and shift work has been put down to melatonin, but sleep disturbances, upset body rhythms, vitamin D or lifestyle differences may also play their part, say the authors.

“As shift work is necessary for many occupations, understanding which specific shift patterns increase breast cancer risk, and how night shift work influences the pathway to breast cancer, is needed for the development of healthy workplace policy,” conclude the authors.

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Chemical exposure at work is putting plastic workers at risk of breast cancer

A new study published in the journal New Solutions presents strong evidence that women employed in the plastics industry are exposed to workplace chemicals that can increase their risk of breast cancer and reproductive abnormalities.

The study, by the University of Stirling, Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers and the National Network on Environments and Women’s Health, supports recent research led by the University of Stirling which reported a five-fold increased risk of developing breast cancer in premenopausal women who work in the plastics industry. Together these studies reveal the need for swift regulatory action on carcinogenic and endocrine disrupting chemicals on a global scale.

One Canadian worker taking part in the study explained the way chemical exposures affect her at work: “I don’t know if it’s from the smoke or if it’s from the fumes. You smell fumes, you taste [it] in your mouth, and then you get—it’s like a light-headedness, dizziness.”

Scottish plastics workers have reported similar experiences when interviewed by researchers:
“My concern was that the chemicals were openly used. Some people would be using different chemicals at more or less every bench. And when some of the ovens were on with no extraction…that was another complaint. I felt my eyes with the heat and the fumes building up – it was almost unbearable. It was really horrendous. F. didn’t bother about PTFE [flu] and he didn’t tell us when he was putting parts in the oven to cure them. It was only when we smelt the fumes and shouted, ‘F, have you put something in the curing?’ and he would go ‘Aye’. I would go like, ‘Get out of the road until it’s cured’. When the oven cools down it means that the fumes are going to stop.”

“Round the fabrication, and you would maybe be doing a job, maybe cementing like the clear acrylics, you would actually go to start work and you could actually see the dust landing on it and you would have to tell him to stop sweeping up because all they were doing was agitating all the dirt in the place and you had to tell him to stop while you got your job done. Because of them having no windows and no extraction, there was nowhere for it to go”.

"Sometimes you would go into the coating shop and when you opened the door, you would get a ‘yuuugh’ and you were gasping to get out of the place [because] you couldn’t breathe…They were spraying stuff and they were coating. What they used to have was these big tubs of powder, they attached a blower to it so that there was air getting blown through it. As soon as you attached the blower it was all over the place…also they used to take parts out of the [back door] and burn the plastic off with a blow torch and all the fumes would blow in.”

The study’s synthesis of scientific findings on carcinogens and endocrine disruptors is one of its most important contributions. Workers in the plastics industry are reported to have high body burdens of hormone disrupting chemicals such as acrylonitrile, styrene, BPA and phthalates.

Professor Andrew Watterson of the University of Stirling said: “In Europe a number of countries have banned bisphenol A (BPA) and took action to ban baby bottles that were manufactured using the known hormone disruptor.

“But often there are still limited or no effective safeguards in place to protect workers who are directly exposed to BPA (and several other carcinogenic and endocrine disrupting chemicals used as additives in plastics manufacturing) on a daily basis.

“In the UK there are some 200,000 workers in the plastics industry in around 6000 workplaces and well over 90% of the workplaces are in small and medium enterprises. Yet the HSE, the UK enforcement agency, has recently floated proposals to remove active inspection of the plastics industry and only engage in reactive visits.

“Our research indicates the need for more not less oversight and investigation of health hazards facing workers in the plastics industry. Endocrine disruptors may also affect men’s health in potentially serious ways and merit serious surveillance.”

Study finds breast cancer risk higher in some jobs

A study published in BioMed Central's Environmental Health confirms that certain occupations do pose a higher risk of breast cancer than others, particularly those that expose the worker to potential carcinogens and endocrine disrupters.


 In their study, James T Brophy and his colleagues set out to characterize the possible links between breast cancer and occupation, particularly in manufacturing and farming.

The study was conducted in Southern Ontario, Canada, and included 1006 breast cancer cases with 1147 randomly selected and matched community controls. Using interviews and surveys, the team collected data on participants' occupational and reproductive histories. All jobs were coded for their likelihood of exposure to carcinogens and endocrine disruptors, and patients' tumor pathology regarding endocrine receptor status was assessed.

The authors found in this group of participants that, across all sectors, women in jobs with potentially high exposures to carcinogens and endocrine disrupters had an elevated breast cancer risk. Sectors with increased risk included:

• Agriculture
• Bar/gambling
• Automotive plastics manufacturing
• Food canning and metal-working

Importantly, pre-menopausal breast cancer risk was highest in the automotive plastics and food canning industries.

The findings also suggested that women with lower socioeconomic status had an elevated risk of breast cancer, which may result from higher exposures to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the lower-income manufacturing and agricultural industries of the study area.

"Our results highlight the importance of occupational studies in identifying and quantifying environmental risk factors and illustrates the value of taking detailed occupational histories of cancer patients. Mounting evidence suggests that we need to re-evaluate occupational exposure limits in regulatory protection," said Brophy.

Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer diagnosis among women in industrialized countries, and North American rates are among the highest in the world.

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Occupational and dietary exposure to acrylamide may lower breast cancer survival chances

A new study has found that of patients with estrogen receptor positive breast cancer, those who had higher exposure to acrylamide were 123 percent more likely to die from the disease, compared with those who had lower exposure.

Acrylamide is a probable human carcinogen recognized by the U.S. National Toxicology Program. Along with occupational exposure, people can also be exposed through tobacco smoke and eating foods processed at high temperature such as french fries.

The study involved 24,697 postmenopausal women who were enrolled in a Danish cohort study between 1993 and 1997 in which 420 participants developed breast cancer before 2001 and 110 died before 2009.

Breast cancer is expected to be diagnosed in more than 230,000 U.S. women in 2012. The disease will likely kill 37,000 women in the same year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Source: Foodconsumer.org