The Queensland Coal Mine Workers’ Cancer and Mortality Study

Chief Investigators

Funding

NHMRC Partnership Grant in conjunction with Resources Safety and Health Queensland (formerly the Queensland Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy), 2020

Estimated completion date

Three-year grant extended until mid 2024.

Summary

Coal mining is a major employment industry in Queensland. Working in coal mines carries risks associated not only with mining accidents and injuries, but from occupational exposures to dust and chemicals. Respiratory diseases including COPD, Coal Workers Pneumoconiosis (aka black lung) and some cancers have variously been shown to be associated with coal mining. To offset these risks, Queensland coal mines operate under stringent safety protocols.

This project linked coal mine worker details with medical registers to identify any elevation in risk of death or cancer beyond that of the general background population risk, to provide insight into the efficacy of current protective strategies.

This data linkage project used personal but not medical data from the Resources Safety and Health Queensland (RSHQ) health assessment database, containing over 160,000 men and almost 19,000 women.  Australian Institute of Health and Welfare records were used to help match RSHQ data with records in the National Death Index and the Australian Cancer Database. Mortality and cancer incidence was compared to age- and sex-matched rates in the general Australian population.

We investigated whether the mortality and cancer incidence increases with longer duration of work as a coal mine worker; and whether it varies by mine type (e.g. open cut or underground) and job type.  Exposure data were available from RSHQ, so risk can then be compared between groups based on extent of exposure to coal mine dust, and potentially to silica and/or diesel engine exhaust.

A tripartite Advisory Committee, including Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and the Australian Workers’ Union (AMU) representatives will provide support and information to the research group.

Projected impact

As of June 2019, coal mining accounted for approximately 30,000 jobs in Queensland.1 The results of this study will provide information that could benefit all of them.

This project is particularly important as, for the first time, women will be included in a large study of coal mine workers. In addition, individualised smoking behaviour will be included, which is a particularly important confounding factor in studies involving respiratory disease endpoints. Finally, a large amount of data from workers on open-cut mines will be incorporated. These now account for 80% of coal mining activity in Australia2; previous major research projects exploring coal mine worker health focussed on underground mine environments.

Reports

Contact

Deborah.Glass@monash.edu

References

  1. Queensland resources employment figures at a high – Queensland Government media statement 21 June 2019, accessed 2 November 2020.
  2. Australian energy facts: coal – Geoscience Australia, accessed 2 November 2020.