title: Mortality due to haematological cancer in cities close to petroleum refineries in Spain.
abstract: Controversy exists as to whether working or living in the vicinity of a petroleum refinery (RF) increases the risk of haematological cancer (HC). The European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register obliges petroleum refineries to notify their emissions of toxic substances which include carcinogenic substances. Our objective is to determine if living in the proximity of an RF is associated with a greater risk of mortality due to HC in the census tracts (CTs) of the Spanish cities of Bilbao, Cartagena, Castellón, La Coruña, Huelva, and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. This is an ecological study of mortality in the years 1996-2007 which includes 968 CTs with 1,263,371 inhabitants. Exposure has been measured as the distance from the centroid of each CT to the RF. The Besag-York-Mollié autoregressive spatial model has been fitted by R-INLA to estimate the relative risk (RR) and 95 % credible intervals (95 % CrI) for distance in quintiles. The most distant quintile has been taken as the reference. A total of 2,574 persons died of HC. The distances from the CTs to RFs ranged from 0.5 to 22.5 km (median = 7.6 km). All of the RRs for the quintiles of distances in Huelva were greater than 1. Statistically significant excess risk was shown in Cartagena in the nearest CT (1.8 to 6.8 km; RR = 1.43, 95 % CrI 1.02 to 2.02). Radial effects have not been detected between the CT of residence and the petroleum RF in mortality due to HC in any of the cities.
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain. Lluis.Cirera@carm.es
authors.forename: Lluís
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Cirera
authors.forename: Francisco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Cirarda
authors.forename: Laia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Palència
authors.forename: Marisa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Estarlich
authors.forename: Agustín
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Montes-Martínez
authors.forename: Pedro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Lorenzo
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Daponte-Codina
authors.forename: Gonzalo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: López-Abente
mesh_terms: D002947:Cities / Q000453:epidemiology; D004781:Environmental Exposure / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D019652:Extraction and Processing Industry / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D019337:Hematologic Neoplasms / Q000401:mortality*; D006801:Humans; D010578:Petroleum; D059392:Petroleum Pollution / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D018570:Risk Assessment; D013030:Spain / Q000453:epidemiology
chemical_list: D010578:Petroleum