Next Webinar:

"Dose reconstruction for epidemiological studies of uranium workers: challenges and solutions"

Dr. Estelle Davesne

Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon, Lyon, France

December 8, 3:00 PM (GMT)
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Abstract

Workers involved in the uranium nuclear cycle are chronically exposed to irradiation, inhalation of radon, radon progeny, and of long-lived radionuclides. Their monitoring was conducted either with ambient or personal dosimeters or periodic bioassays, depending on the exposure scenario. As several decades of extensive administrative and health and exposure data are available, epidemiological studies on these populations of workers will help to compare the risks arising from acute external irradiation with those generated from incorporated radionuclides with low dose rates.
To identify health effects, absorbed doses in relevant tissues should be based on bioassay and exposure conditions. However, monitoring data were gathered by routine monitoring to verify that workers’ exposures complied with regulatory dose limits, not to assess absorbed doses. Moreover, most monitoring results were recorded as “below the mínimum reporting level”. Although epidemiologists have gathered information on workers’ exposures by building job-exposure matrices, information on exposure conditions is incomplete. Thus, the reconstruction of doses received during the whole career of the worker is challenging.
The webinar will be focused on the challenges of dosimetry for epidemiological studies and the harmonized approach developed for the international Pooled Analysis of Uranium Workers Project (iPAUW) to reconstruct doses to assess the health risks for the first international pooled analysis of uranium processing workers.