Job Exposure Matrices for Benzene and Oil Mist/Vapor among Offshore Workers (2025)
The project is a work package conducted by UiB during the period 2022-2025 as part of an NFR-funded project led by the Cancer Registry of Norway/UiO.
Main content
The title of the main project is "Exposure Assessment and Prevention of Death, Disease and Injuries among Offshore Petroleum Workers." UiB's work package "Development of benzene and oil mist/vapor JEMs for the period 2000–2020" involves processing and modeling already collected exposure data (air measurements) on benzene and oil mist and vapor.
In a previous project, UiB published a semi-quantitative job exposure matrix (JEM) for the period 1970-2010 in 2012 (https://w2.uib.no/filearchive/supplementary-information-to-the-jem-.pdf).
This JEM has been used by the Cancer Registry in several studies where they have investigated the relationship between exposure to various chemical components and cancer risk.
The new project updates and improves the JEM to be valid until 2020 for 25 job categories. This is done by using measurement data that UiB has collected from the industry during previous projects. For benzene, we only have measurement data for a few of the job categories included in the Cancer Registry's offshore cohort of workers. Therefore, we have used an expert group from the industry to develop exposure indices for benzene for the various job categories based on the tasks they usually perform. Based on the measurement data and expert assessments, we develop exposure estimates for each job category for each decade from 1970 to 2020.