ALGORITHMS FOR ESTIMATING PERSONAL EXPOSURES TO CHEMICAL-AGENTS IN THE SEMICONDUCTOR HEALTH STUDY

For exposure assessment in a series of epidemiologic studies of semico nductor industry workers, estimates of potential personal exposures to selected chemical agents were developed using a set of algorithms. A worker's total exposure to each agent was defined as the sum of task s cores for each task using that agent. Task scores were calculated as t he intensity and frequency score for each task, modified by a factor i ndicating degree of presence of the target agent and a process-specifi c emission factor representing degree of emission control present for that process. The algorithms used multiple sources of information to g enerate an exposure score for each worker-process-agent combination. E xposure scores were then placed into ordinal categories of exposure (0 -3) for use in the epidemiologic analysis. (C) 1995 Wiley-Liss, Inc.