Abstract
Controversy exists as to whether working or living in the vicinity of a petroleum refinery (RF) increases the risk of haematological cancer (HC). The European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register obliges petroleum refineries to notify their emissions of toxic substances which include carcinogenic substances. Our objective is to determine if living in the proximity of an RF is associated with a greater risk of mortality due to HC in the census tracts (CTs) of the Spanish cities of Bilbao, Cartagena, Castellón, La Coruña, Huelva, and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. This is an ecological study of mortality in the years 1996–2007 which includes 968 CTs with 1,263,371 inhabitants. Exposure has been measured as the distance from the centroid of each CT to the RF. The Besag–York–Mollié autoregressive spatial model has been fitted by R-INLA to estimate the relative risk (RR) and 95 % credible intervals (95 % CrI) for distance in quintiles. The most distant quintile has been taken as the reference. A total of 2,574 persons died of HC. The distances from the CTs to RFs ranged from 0.5 to 22.5 km (median = 7.6 km). All of the RRs for the quintiles of distances in Huelva were greater than 1. Statistically significant excess risk was shown in Cartagena in the nearest CT (1.8 to 6.8 km; RR = 1.43, 95 % CrI 1.02 to 2.02). Radial effects have not been detected between the CT of residence and the petroleum RF in mortality due to HC in any of the cities.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Enric Rovira, Anna Cuadras, and Marc Saez for their collaboration; Monica Ballesta and Carmen Navarro for their help in the manuscript; and Javier García-Perez, Pablo Fernández-Navarro, and Rebeca Ramis for their clarifications and support for all matters related to the PRTR and analysis capabilities.
Funding
This work was supported by the Spanish Health Research Fund from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (Carlos III Institute of Health) [FIS-FEDER: PI081713, PI080662, PI08/0330, PI081488, PI081978] and FUNCIS (Fundación Canaria de Investigación y Salud).
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Responsible editor: Philippe Garrigues
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Table S1
Haematological cancer mortality RR and 95 % CrI in women and men by distance quintile (km) from the census tracts to the petroleum refinery in Spanish cities, 1996–2007 (DOC 147 KB)
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Cirera, L., Cirarda, F., Palència, L. et al. Mortality due to haematological cancer in cities close to petroleum refineries in Spain. Environ Sci Pollut Res 20, 591–596 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-012-1152-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-012-1152-1