Use of TETRA personal radios and sickness absence in the Airwave Health Monitoring Study of the British police forces
Autor: | Anne-Claire Vergnaud, Dennis McRobie, Jeanette Spear, Håvard Wahl Kongsgård, Maria Aresu, Paul Elliott, Andy Heard, David C. Muller, Catherine Mbema, Deepa Singh, He Gao |
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Přispěvatelé: | Home Office, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust- BRC Funding, Medical Research Council (MRC), Cancer Research UK |
Rok vydání: | 2019 |
Předmět: |
Radio Waves
05 Environmental Sciences 010501 environmental sciences Toxicology Logistic regression 01 natural sciences Biochemistry Sickness absence Odds EMF 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Terrestrial Trunked Radio Interquartile range Occupational Exposure Cox proportional hazards regression Humans Medicine 030212 general & internal medicine 0105 earth and related environmental sciences General Environmental Science business.industry TETRA 06 Biological Sciences Radio Police Confidence interval Radiofrequency Sick Leave 03 Chemical Sciences business Demography |
Zdroj: | Environmental Research. 175:148-155 |
ISSN: | 0013-9351 |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.envres.2019.05.012 |
Popis: | Background Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) is used for radiocommunications among the British police forces. Objectives To investigate association of personal radio use and sickness absence among police officers and staff from the Airwave Health Monitoring Study. Methods Participant-level sickness absence records for 26 forces were linked with personal radio use for 32,102 participants. We used multivariable logistic regression to analyse TETRA usage in year prior to enrolment and sickness absence (lasting more than 7 or 28 consecutive days) in the following year and a zero-inflated negative binomial model for analyses of number of sickness absence episodes of any duration (‘spells’) over the same period. In secondary analyses, we looked at an extended period of observation among a sub-cohort with linked data over time, using Cox proportional hazards regression. Results Median personal radio use (year prior to enrolment) was 29.7 min per month (interquartile range 7.5, 64.7) among users. In the year following enrolment there were 25,655 sickness absence spells among 15,248 participants. There were similar risks of sickness absence lasting more than seven days among users and non-users, although among users risk was higher with greater use, odds ratio = 1.04 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.02 to 1.06) per doubling of radio use. There was no association for sickness absence of more than 28 days. For sickness absence spells, risk was lower among users than non-users (incidence rate ratio = 0.91; 95% CI 0.75 to 1.11), again with higher risk among users for greater radio use. There was no association between radio use and sickness absence in secondary analyses. Discussion There were similar or lower risks of sickness absence in TETRA radio users compared with non-users. Among users, the higher risk of sickness absence with greater radio use may reflect working pattern differences among police personnel rather than effects of radiofrequency exposure. |
Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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