Cheryl E. Peters, Jean-François Sauvé, Jérôme Lavoué, Hugues W. Davies, Marie-Élise Parent, Marie-Pierre Sylvestre, Université de Montréal (UdeM), University of British Columbia (UBC), Institut Armand Frappier (INRS-IAF), Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique [Québec] (INRS)-Réseau International des Instituts Pasteur (RIIP), Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM), CAREX Canada [Vancouver], Alberta Health Services [Calgary], University of Calgary, The Canadian Workplace Exposure Database (CWED) was developed by grants from WorkSafeBC and the Ministry of Labour in Manitoba. In-kind and financial support for its development was also provided by CAREX Canada via the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer. The actual development of the CANJEM was funded by the Société de recherche sur le cancer (SRC) through the GrePEC initiative. The original studies were funded by a number of agencies, including the National Health Research and Development Programme, Health Canada, the National Cancer Institute of Canada, the Medical Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). J.F.S. was supported by the doctoral training scholarships from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQS) and the Institut de Recherche Robert-Sauvé en Santé et en Sécurité du Travail. M.E.P. and J.L. had a salary award from the FRQS. MPS holds a chercheur-boursier Junior 1 award from the FRQS., and We would like to thank the staff of Provincial agencies who facilitated the development of memorandum of understandings and sharing of exposure data. We would also like to acknowledge the staff members and scientists from CAREX Canada who worked on the vision for, and development and improvements of the CWED, including Amy Hall, Calvin Ge, Loretta Bogart-O’Brien, and Paul Demers. Melissa Friesen and Weiwei Du also helped with the development of CWED. Readers interested in working with the CWED database should contact H.W.D. at hugh.davies@ubc.ca. The original approach to expert assessment of exposure from detailed job histories was developed primarily by Michel Gérin and Jack Siemiatycki, with input throughout from the various teams responsible for exposure assessment for the original studies. Jack Siemiatycki was the principal investigator of the multi-site and lung cancer studies, and is the co-leader of CANJEM. Many chemists and hygienists have contributed their expertise to the coding of the previous studies on which this method was based. Our thanks for their creativity and dedication. Some of the computations were conducted on the computer cluster Briarée, which is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, NanoQuebec, Réseau de Médecine Génétique Appliquée, and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Nature et Technologies (FRQ-NT)
Objectives The CANJEM general population job-exposure matrix summarizes expert evaluations of 31 673 jobs from four population-based case–control studies of cancer conducted in Montreal, Canada. Intensity in each CANJEM cell is represented as relative distributions of the ordinal (low, medium, high) ratings of jobs assigned by the experts. We aimed to apply quantitative concentrations to CANJEM cells using Canadian historical measurements from the Canadian Workplace Exposure Database (CWED), taking exposure to wood dust as an example. Methods We selected 5170 personal and area wood dust measurements from 31 occupations (2011 Canadian National Occupational Classification) with a non-zero exposure probability in CANJEM between 1930 and 2005. The measurements were taken between 1981 and 2003 (median 1989). A Bayesian hierarchical model was applied to the wood dust concentrations with occupations as random effects, and sampling duration, year, sample type (area or personal), province, and the relative proportion of jobs exposed at medium and high intensity in CANJEM cells as fixed effects. Results The estimated geometric mean (GM) concentrations for a CANJEM cell with all jobs exposed at medium or high intensity were respectively 1.3 and 2.4 times higher relative to a cell with all jobs at low intensity. An overall trend of −3%/year in exposure was observed. Applying the model estimates to all 198 cells in CANJEM with some exposure assigned by the experts, the predicted 8-hour, personal wood dust GM concentrations by occupation for 1989 ranged from 0.48 to 1.96 mg m−3. Conclusions The model provided estimates of wood dust concentrations for any CANJEM cell with exposure, applicable for quantitative risk assessment at the population level. This framework can be implemented for other agents represented in both CANJEM and CWED.