By Mary Rose Roberts

For FireChief.com

NIOSH provided a status update on its long-term firefighter cancer study, conducted in partnership with the U.S. Fire Administration and the National Cancer Institute. The goal of the study is to determine whether firefighters have a higher risk of cancer and other illness due to on-the-job toxin exposure. Researchers are analyzing the health of more than 30,000 firefighters who worked between 1950 and 2010 at San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago fire departments.

“The cooperation of the fire departments in these three cities has been exceptional,” Study Director Travis Kubale wrote in a NIOSH newsletter. “Department staff, city officials and union leaders have gone out of their way to welcome us and help us get underway with the project.”

Kubale said they are near completion of identifying all firefighters who worked during 1950 to 2010. Researchers have collected their individual work histories and are in the process of gathering exposure information, including fire runs made and the dates of when personal protective equipment and diesel exhaust controls were put into place at the departments.

“NIOSH team members work with fire department staff (personnel, payroll, and information technology), retirement board and fire museum staff to locate the information needed for the study. Some departments archive records off-site, which we retrieve and review,” Kubale wrote.  “Once we locate and collect the records, we spend many hours poring over ledgers, annual report and microfiche. This time-intensive process is critical for the study’s integrity. To date, NIOSH data coders have made approximately 790,000 separate data entries for the San Francisco, Chicago and Philadelphia departments.”

Read the full article on the Fire Chief website.