Leukemia

Leukemia is a cancer of the bone marrow and blood. The two primary types of leukemia are lymphocytic leukemia, which involves an increase of white blood cells called lymphocytes; and myelogenous leukemia (also known as myeloid or myelocytic leukemia), which involves an increase in white blood cells called granulocytes. Leukemia can be acute or chronic. Acute forms of leukemia progress rapidly, whereas chronic forms of leukemia progress slowly, leading to different approaches to diagnosis and treatment.

Lung Cancer, the Number One Cancer Killer

Each year, about 200,000 people in the United States are told they have lung cancer and more than 150,000 people die from this disease. Deaths from lung cancer represent about one out of every six deaths from cancer in the U.S.

Risk Factors
Research has found several causes and risk factors for lung cancer. A risk factor is anything that changes the chance of getting a disease. Lung cancer risk factors include :

1. Smoking.

Estimation of exposure

To estimate the proportion of workers exposed to carcinogens for lung cancer and leukaemia, we use the exposed proportions  of workers in the industrial sectors or occupations who were exposed to the carcinogens (from CAREX, a European survey described below in Section 5.2).  This was  the approach recently used in a global estimate of the disease burden (Ezzati et al., 2002; WHO, 2002; Concha-Barrientos et al., 2004).  However, should exposure data be available for the national or local level, they should be used instead of the CAREX data.  For the CRA project (Concha-Barrientos et al., 2004), routine employment data were used to determine the proportion of people in each industrial sector.  The exposed populations were then divided into high and low exposure groups.  This information was then combined with the CAREX data to estimate the proportion of workers exposed at high or low levels to the carcinogens.

Ideally, the above information should come from data assessed in the country or study area, particularly the first three requirements, but since this is not always possible values based on the global analysis can be used (Concha-Barrientos et al., 2004).