Health status of a population living nearby an incinerator

Introduction: A large study has been conducted in the year 2000 to verify the population and the environment health status nearby an incinerator. Results showed some associations for residence inside 4 km’s from the incinerator and mortality for rectum, and liver cancer, Non Hodgkin Lymphoma and COPD, and with hospital admissions (H.A.) for all cancers, cancer of colon, of central nervous system, leukaemia, Non Hodgkin Lymphoma (NHL), hearth failure, COPD, pneumonia, cirrhosis. As the health events data set has been very recently updated to year 2003, we present a preliminary analyses on Non Hodgkin lymphoma, and further analyses will be presented later. Methods: The built data set include different types of individual data: mortality (since 1990) and hospital admissions (since 1998) from LHU registries, Municipality General Registry Office data for each year (since 1990) that includes geographical coordinates. Over 95% of data were linked together. All the city area has been subdivided by squares of one km’s. For each sub area we have conducted different analyses: SMR, cluster detection by Kulldorff spatial-scan statistics, and score test to evaluate the pattern of disease frequency around the point-focus. Morbidity was analysed considering patients and not hospitalization, identifying only the first H.A. for the NHL. Results: SMR results found an significant association with NHL morbidity among males (3 cases and 0.31 expected) in only two sub-areas of the city, sited at North East at 1,5 km’s from the incinerator. In the same areas Kulldorff SSS found a cluster always for males, but non statistical significant (p0.434). Finally the score test indicates again a significant association of NHL morbidity and residence distance from the incinerator among males. Discussion and Conclusions: These analyses confirm results obtained in the previous study concerning NHL disease and residence nearby the incinerator. In that surveys environmental measures were conducted by the Regional Agency for Environment Protection and founded in the subareas, now identified at risk of NHL, higher levels of zinc, lead, arsenic and copper in the soil. These aspects will be investigated as also morbidity for the other pathologies