Cancer incidence in textile manufacturing workers in Australia.

The textile manufacturing industry consists of a wide range of occupations including spinning, weaving, knitting, dyeing and finishing of natural and synthetic fibres to produce fabrics, yarns and carpets. The range of exposures in the industry includes textile related dusts, chemicals used in making synthetic textiles, sizing agents, oil mist, dyes, solvents, crease-resistance agents, flame retardants, and mothproofing agents. The International Agency for Research in Cancer has reported that working in this industry entails exposures that are possibly carcinogenic to humans. But many studies examining the cancer risks in this industry used mortality rather than incidence data and had poor exposure data. This study aimed to investigate the risk of incident cancer in textile manufacturing workers using improved exposure assessment methods. An earlier analysis of the mortality data from this cohort showed that male textile workers had an increased risk of death from injury, but no increase in risk of death from cancer.