Description

A number of known carcinogens are released in substantial quantities into the air and water by specific industries. Although occupational studies have documented increased cancer risks for workers in several of these industries, the effect of industrial emissions on the risk of cancer for nearby residents is more difficult to establish. There have been few non-ecologic epidemiologic examinations, in Canada or elsewhere, to evaluate cancer risk that might be associated with residential exposure to industrial pollutants.

Ecological epidemiologic analyses have been used to evaluate environmental cancer risks; however, these types of examinations have a number of unavoidable limitations. Ecological analysis may fail to detect real relationships or produce spurious relationships because of populations mobility, cancer latency, ecological fallacy and/or uncontrolled confounding factors. Epidemiologic examinations that use case-control methods avoid many of the limitations, providing a more powerful means of evaluating health effects.

In addition, concern in Canada over the past twenty-five years about industrial pollution has resulted in a substantial amount of work in the areas of pollutant monitoring and assessment of industrial contamination of the environment. The Enhanced Cancer Surveillance will capitalize on the strength of case-control methods and the availability of environmental quality data to enhance evaluation of cancer risks at the community level.

This project is a large multi-site case-control surveillance being undertaken as a central component of the Enhanced Cancer Surveillance System. The project will provide an opportunity to extend existing geographic surveillance activities and increase the scope of data collected by the Cancer Registry reporting systems, substantially expanding the ability to evaluate environment-cancer concerns in Canada. Specifically, the surveillance system will examine how residential proximity to polluting industries and exposures to pollutants in drinking water affect cancer risk in Canadian communities.

The Enhanced Cancer Surveillance is a collaborative effort between Health Canada and the Provincial Cancer Agencies. It is a component of the Environment Related Disease Surveillance, an initiative under the Action Plan on Health and the Environment, Health Canada's part of the Government of Canada's Green Plan.

Principal Investigator

• Nhu Le

Research Team

• Heather Neidig

Funding Agency

• Health Canada

Funding Period

• 1994-1998