Association between Oil Spill Clean-up Work and Cardiovascular Disease

Abstract

TPS 791: Occupational health 1, Exhibition Hall, Ground floor, August 26, 2019, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM Background/Aim: Taean, South Korea has experienced the Hebei Spirit oil spill in December, 2007. After about 10 years of follow-up, it would be timely to evaluate the effect of the disaster on cardiovascular health among clean-up workers/volunteers. Methods: We used data from a prospective cohort study, the Health Effects Research on Hebei Spirit Oil Spill (HEROS), in Taean, South Korea. At baseline, local residents were asked the amount of clean-up work they volunteered and diagnosis history of angina and myocardial infarction (MI). Five subsequent examinations followed the change of their diagnosis and other time-varying covariates. We analyzed the data using marginal logistic model based on the generalized estimating equations (GEE) approach to estimate the risk of cardiovascular disease associated with the total time of clean-up work in a longitudinal setting. Other covariates include sex, age, body mass index, smoking status, alcohol consumption, physical activity, income, and education. Stabilized Inverse probability weights (IPW) were applied to adjust censoring during follow-up. The interaction between residential exposure measured as the distance to the contaminated shorelines was also tested. Results: During about 10 years of follow-up, there were 204 incident cases of angina or MI reported by participants (n=9,246). The risk of angina or MI was associated with a 10-hour increase in the total time of clean-up work (OR: 1.03, 95% CI: 1.01 to 1.05). The interaction was statistically significant (p-value=0.0156) Conclusions: Oil spill clean-up work was associated with incident cases of angina or MI.