BEIJING, March 23 (Xinhuanet) -- The act of
firefighting increases firefighters' risk of death from coronary heart disease
by up to 100 times compared to non emergency duties, a new study published
Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested.
The research team, comprising U.S. and Greek
scientists, already knew from previous studies that heart disease accounts for
45 percent of deaths among U.S. firefighters while they are on duty.
What they did in this study was to establish which duties
carry the most and the least risk in the daily work of the firefighter.
They looked at 11 years of records provided by the
Federal Emergency Management Agency of all deaths on duty of firefighters
between 1994 and 2004, leaving out those linked to the 2001 Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks.
"What makes this study unique is not that we
described the number of deaths that were due to heart disease or even exactly
what duties they occurred in," Stefanos Kales of Harvard Medical School,
Boston, MA, said. "Instead, this is a statistical analysis with several
different models that allowed us to estimate duty-specific risks. We think we've
provided the strongest evidence to date that specific firefighting activities
can indeed trigger heart events in susceptible firefighters."
Sudden intense physical exertion and exposure to
heat, chemicals and smoke can put enough stress on the heart to spark an attack,
especially among firefighters not in the best shape, the research said.
The goal of the research, they said, is to keep
firefighters, who usually enter the workforce very healthy, as healthy as
possible throughout their working life. Preplacement and annual medical
examinations, including clearance for firefighters to wear self-contained
breathing apparatuses, the implementation of fitness programs, and annual
physical-performance evaluations should be mandatory, they added.
(Agencies)
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