January 31, 2022
Disparities in occupational health exposures and outcomes across sociodemographic groups have been consistently identified in the United States. However, there is currently no ongoing nationwide system to track occupational health disparities, nor is there a system to track who is exposed to work-related hazards in the US. Current tracking systems have primarily been focused on measuring health outcomes and they do not consistently track demographic variables.
Shelley Stephan, a second-year student in the MS in Occupational Hygiene program, is working to fill in gaps in the data. For her thesis she combined job-exposure matrix data with employment and demographic data to estimate the burden of occupational exposures for all workers and by sociodemographic groups. The primary objective of this work is to determine the prevalence of exposure to 200+ occupational hazards in the US, as well as identify hazards that disproportionately burden specific sociodemographic groups.
Identifying who experiences the burden of occupational exposures
The most common workplace exposure in the dataset was to cleaning agents, with an estimated exposure to approximately 18.6 million (11.8%) US workers. Shelley and her team also found that workers who are BIPOC, female, lower educated, or foreign-born experience a disproportionately high burden of exposure to cleaning agents. This is a workplace hazard with limited regulation in much of the United States.
Understanding the burden of occupational exposures can supplement current health outcome surveillance efforts by identifying hazards and ideally intervening to control them before work-related injuries and illnesses occur. Characterizing the distribution of exposures by sociodemographic groups can identify specific working populations that are disproportionately burdened by workplace hazards and at greatest risk of work-related injuries and illnesses.
Next steps
At the completion of this project, Shelley and her team hope to have the data publicly available for exploration and download through an online interactive tool. The exposure data generated from this project is vast and can be explored in a number of different ways, with information available on number of workers exposed to 200+ hazardous agents and how exposure burden differs by race/ethnicity, sex, education status, median income of the worker, and nativity and citizenship status.
The wealth of data generated through this project will allow occupational health researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to better understand the burden of exposures across and within US working populations, and to inform equitable exposure prevention and intervention strategies aimed at reducing occupational illnesses and injuries in the US.
Learning valuable skills for public health impact
For the project Shelley wrote the R code to merge three large datasets and performed the required data analysis. These skills build upon her experience interning with Dr. Trevor Peckham, an environmental scientist at the King County Hazardous Waste Management Program. For her internship she used these same data to investigate industries in King County with increased likelihood of exposure to certain priority contaminants.
Prior to starting the MS in Occupational Hygiene program at the UW, Shelley never imagined she would be working on a thesis project that involved coding to merge and analyze large data sources. She was surprised to learn how much she enjoyed learning to code in R, as well as think about data visualization.
She is extremely grateful to be working on this project with Dr. Marissa Baker, her faculty and thesis advisor, and Dr. Trevor Peckham. They have provided her with an endless amount of guidance and have challenged her to think more critically and broadly about the role of occupational hygiene in the greater public health field.
Cover photo credit: AdobeStock/Tadamichi
