United States: New research shows that workers who make stone countertops may develop lung problems. Breathing in dust from cutting and finishing the stone can lead to a serious lung disease called silicosis. This was revealed in a study shared at a meeting in Chicago.
“This study reveals a major research gap pertaining to awareness and practice of exposure and screening for workers in the engineered stone manufacturing industry,” according to Dr. Sundus Lateef, a lead author of the study.
Silicosis is most found in individuals in the mining or construction occupations.
As reported by the HealthDay, “This group requires pre-emptive encouragement for screening and earlier advocacy; in this study, they included Spanish-speaking immigrant workers,” Lateef, who is a diagnostic radiology resident at the; University of California, Los Angeles.
The disease is gotten through the inhalation of very small particles of silica. It has been known to permanently damage lungs instead leading to complete loss of respiratory functions.
Although it is usually a relatively uncommon diagnosis at the Los Angeles hospital, scans began arriving at its radiology department with obvious manifestations of the disease, finds Lateef’s team.
Together, a new analysis of the 55 workers who fabricated engineered stone countertops all of whom were Hispanic men, the silicosis appeared for these workers on lung CT scans.
21 men from the studied group being only men, all of them had developed severe silicosis symptoms. The employees were 43 years old on average, and on average, they had spent 18 years working in countertop manufacture.
Such questions can be answerable such statements referring to median: (Median means that half of them were older and worked more years in the industry while half were younger and never did.)
Of the twenty-one cases only four were identified at the initial presentation of the worker to a physician and radiologists diagnosed it only a third of the time the worker presented with the regenerative burst.
The issue for non-specialists, and fairly many radiologists too, is that many are not anticipating the presence of silicosis or recognizing it at imaging.
“Radiographers are endemic to ‘real-life’ practice settings where unanticipated, atypical presentations of silicosis may unmask professional responsibility; hence, one anticipates delays in diagnosis,” said Lateef in an RSNA news release.