Notice of RetractionModeling of Occupational Exposure to Benzene and Health Risk of Workers in Styrene Production

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

This paper investigated the quantitative cancer-risk assessment method of chronic exposure to benzene, and applied this method in occupational hazards assessment and risk management. It provides a scientific basis for control of occupational hazards, prevention and management of occupational cancer. A new 500,000 ton/year styrene plant of a large-scale petrochemical enterprise was selected as study object. The four-step health risk classification method was used as study procedure. It includes four steps: (1)Hazards Identification, (2) Dose-response Assessment, (3) Exposure Assessment, (4) Risk Characterization. Besides conventional epidemiological survey and toxicology research, this study also considered the exposure intensity and frequency of the workers. The cancer risk of benzene-exposed workers was considered as assessment target. ERDEM software was used to simulate the internal exposure dose. Multistage model was used to assess the quantitative relationship between exposure dose and carcinogenic response. As uncertainties exist in exposure and risk assessment, Monte Carlo simulation was used to analyze the probability distribution. Through assessment, we got the result that the cancer risk of the exposed workers was higher than the value of acceptable risk level defined by EPA (1×10⁶). That means some measures should be taken to reduce the risk.