Article
Version 1
Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
Health Risk Assessment of VOCs from Surgical Smoke
Version 1
: Received: 15 July 2017 / Approved: 17 July 2017 / Online: 17 July 2017 (07:40:18 CEST)
How to cite: She, S.; Lu, G.; Yang, W.; Hong, M.; Zhu, L. Health Risk Assessment of VOCs from Surgical Smoke. Preprints 2017, 2017070042. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201707.0042.v1 She, S.; Lu, G.; Yang, W.; Hong, M.; Zhu, L. Health Risk Assessment of VOCs from Surgical Smoke. Preprints 2017, 2017070042. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201707.0042.v1
Abstract
Surgical smoke is produced by energy-based surgical instruments. The airborne volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from surgical smoke may have potential health risk. This study aimed to evaluate the evidence for the harmful effects on the operating theater staff. An internationally recognized evaluation model of health risk assessment (HRA) was adapted to preliminarily assess the health risks caused by VOCs in surgical smoke. Results of HRA indicated that non-carcinogenic risk indexes of VOCs did not exceed one, indicating that these pollutants didn't cause significant non-carcinogenic harm to the health of the operating theater staff. But the cancer risk indexes exposed to formaldehyde and benzene all exceed 10-5, which was higher than the suggested value of USEPA (10-6) and might cause potential harm to the health of the operating theater staff. Long-term exposure of such surgical smoke will be harmful to the health of the operating theater staff and have a great risk of cancer.
Keywords
surgical smoke; volatile organic compounds (VOCs); health risk assessment (HRA); carcinogenic
Subject
Public Health and Healthcare, Public, Environmental and Occupational Health
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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