Health Hazard Evaluation Report: HETA-2008-0155-3131, June 2011. Lung Function (Spirometry) Testing in Employees at a Flavorings Manufacturing Plant - Indiana.

摘要

In March 2008, an International Brotherhood of Teamsters local union requested a health hazard evaluation at a flavoring manufacturing company because of concern about possible lung effects of flavoring exposures, including diacetyl. In May 2008, NIOSH conducted a brief walk-through visit of the company. Subsequently, the company brought litigation to prevent further on-site evaluations. In June 2009, after resolution of the litigation, the company agreed to provide NIOSH with various medical and workplace information. All information was received by November 2009. NIOSH staff evaluated spirometry data supplied by the company on production employees tested from 1998 through 2009. The majority of the spirometry tests was performed in the years 2004 and later. We classified spirometry tests for quality and compared the prevalence of abnormalities in acceptable quality tests to national population prevalence, adjusted for the distributions of age, sex, race, smoking, and body mass index in the company's employees. We calculated declines over time in forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1), a lung function measurement made using spirometry, for employees with more than one spirometry test of acceptable quality, since excessive decline in FEV1 can be an early marker of lung disease. Using an approach that adjusts for quality of a spirometry monitoring program, reflected by within-person variation, we compared the declines in lung function to a statistically-determined lower limit of normal decline.