Skin conditions associated with dermal exposure to oil spill chemicals among Deepwater Horizon disaster response and cleanup workers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Previous studies have associated oil spill response and cleanup (OSRC) work with skin symptoms, but evidence is lacking on the specific exposure agents that contributed to these skin effects. OBJECTIVES: We investigated OSRC-related exposures, including dermal exposure to specific chemical agents, in relation to acute and longer-term skin conditions among the 2010 Deepwater Horizon (DWH) OSRC workers. METHODS: At GuLF Study enrollment, workers reported duration of work, jobs performed, and skin contact with crude oil/tar, dispersants, and decontamination chemicals. Cumulative dermal exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from oil/tar was estimated based on the "GuLF DREAM model". We used Poisson regression with robust standard errors to evaluate associations of exposures with prevalent skin conditions during spill cleanup and at enrollment (1-3 years later) and incident eczema diagnoses after the start of OSRC work. We examined modification of associations between exposures and prevalent conditions by use of rubber/synthetic gloves. RESULTS: Duration of OSRC work was positively associated with skin conditions and eczema diagnoses (p-trend<0.01). Workers in operations, response, and decontamination jobs had higher skin condition prevalence (during cleanup: PR range=3.13-4.51; at enrollment: PR range=2.20-2.94) and eczema risk (RR range=1.44-1.89) compared to support workers. After adjusting for co-exposures, we saw associations of skin conditions during cleanup with dermal exposure to oil/tar (PR=3.41, 95 %CI: 3.14, 3.69), decontamination chemicals (PR=1.55, 95 %CI: 1.46, 1.64), dispersants (PR=1.44, 95 %CI: 1.33, 1.57), and PAHs (p-trend<0.01). These associations remained apparent at enrollment. Eczema diagnosis was associated with exposure to oil/tar (RR=1.56, 95 %CI: 1.20, 2.04) and PAHs (Tertile 3 vs. 1: PR=1.33, 95 %CI: 0.86, 2.07). Effect estimates were on average 21 % lower among workers who used rubber/synthetic gloves. CONCLUSIONS: Duration of work, working in non-support jobs, and dermal exposure to oil/tar, dispersants, decontamination chemicals, and PAHs were associated with acute and longer-term skin effects among the DWH OSRC workers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".