Documents laser 6 results

"Objectives Smoke generated during laser surgery and electrocautery contains respiratory irritants and human carcinogens. Although laboratory and animal studies have demonstrated that this smoke has inflammatory and mutagenic potential, no population-based studies of the health effects of exposure to surgical smoke have been published. We examined the association between duration of employment as an operating room nurse, a proxy measure for surgical smoke exposure, and subsequent lung cancer risk.Methods This study was conducted among 86 747 women in the Nurses' Health Study. Information on the duration of prior operating room employment was collected in 1984, and the women were followed for incident, confirmed lung cancer. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to model the incidence rate ratio of lung cancer for each exposure category using women with no prior operating room employment for comparison. All of the models were adjusted for age, smoking history, passive smoke exposure, fruit and vegetable consumption, and alpha carotene and lycopene intake. Results A history of operating room employment was not associated with an increased rate of lung cancer in multivariable analyses [rate ratio (RR) 0.99, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 0.86–1.15]. In fact, nurses in the highest exposure category, =15 years of operating room employment, had a significantly lower rate of lung cancer than nurses with no prior operating room employment (RR 0.58, 95% CI 0.37–0.91), possibly due to confounding by overall health status or residual confounding by smoking history.Conclusions Long-term exposure to surgical smoke, as measured by the duration of operating room employment, does not appear to increase the risk of lung cancer."

"During the past two decades, many books, governmental reports and regulations on safety measures against chemicals, fire, microbiological and radioactive hazards in laboratories have been published from various countries. These topics have also been briefly discussed in books on laboratory planning and management. The application of various scientific instruments based on different ionizing and non-ionizing radiations have brought new safety problems to the laboratory workers of today, irrespective of their scientific disciplines, be they in medicine, natural or life sciences. However, no comprehensive laboratory handbook dealing with all these hazards, some of which are recently introduced, has so far been available in a single volume. Therefore, it was thought worthwhile to publish this handbook on safety and health measures for laboratories, with contributions from several experts on these subjects. As this is a multi-author volume, some duplication in content among the chapters is unavoidable in order to maintain the context of a chapter as well as to make each chapter complete. An attempt has also been made to maintain the central theme, which is how to work in a laboratory with maximum possible environmental safety."