Development of an Asthma-Specific Job Exposure Matrix for Use in the United States

Details

• Alternative Title:
  Ann Work Expo Health
• Personal Author:
  Henneberger, Paul K. ; Kurth, Laura M. ; Doney, Brent ; Liang, Xiaoming ; Andersson, Eva
• Description:
  Introduction:
  
  Existing asthma-specific job-exposure matrices (JEMs) do not necessarily reflect current working conditions in the USA and do not directly function with occupational coding systems commonly used in the USA. We initiated a project to modify an existing JEM to address these limitations, and to apply the new JEM to the entire US employed population to estimate quantitatively the extent of probable work-related asthma exposures nationwide.
  
  Methods:
  
  We started with an asthma-specific JEM that was developed for northern Europe (the N-JEM) and modified it to function with the 2010 US Standard Occupational Classification (SOC-2010) codes and to reflect working conditions in the USA during the post-2000 period. This involved cross walking from the 1988 International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-88) codes used in the N-JEM to the SOC-2010 codes, transferring the N-JEM exposure assignments to the SOC-2010 codes, and modifying those assignments to reflect working conditions in the USA. The new US asthma JEM (USA-JEM) assigns exposures to 19 agents organized into five categories. The USA-JEM and N-JEM were applied to the same sample of working adults with asthma to compare how they performed, and the USA-JEM was also applied to the entire 2015 US working population to estimate the extent of occupational asthma exposures nationally.
  
  Results:
  
  The USA-JEM assigns at least one asthma-related probable exposure to 47.5% and at least one possible exposure to 14.9% of the 840 SOC-2010 detailed occupations, and 9.0% of the occupations have both probable exposure to at least one agent and possible exposure to at least one other agent. The USA-JEM has greater sensitivity for cleaning products, highly reactive disinfectants and sterilants, and irritant peak exposures than the N-JEM. When applied to the entire 2015 US working population, the USA-JEM determined that 42.6% of workers had probable exposure to at least one type of occupational asthma agent.
  
  Discussion:
  
  A new asthma-specific JEM for application in the USA was developed. Additional work is needed to compare its performance to similar JEMs and, if possible, to exposure assessments generated on a case-by-case basis.
  
  
• Subjects:
  Adult Asthma, Occupational Disinfectants Humans Occupational Exposure Occupations
• Source:
  Ann Work Expo Health. 64(1):82-95
• Pubmed ID:
  31746973
• Pubmed Central ID:
  PMC9990745
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Funding:
  CC999999/ImCDC/Intramural CDC HHSUnited States/
• Place as Subject:
  United States
• Volume:
  64
• Issue:
  1
• Collection(s):
  CDC Public Access
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:65a49c63838c888c3bf05678e23c5727641fd130e2c6b9003fb498fcdd4d0927
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/125477/cdc_125477_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 121.53 KB ]