Urinary mutagenic activity in workers exposed to diesel exhaust

We measured postshift urinary mutagenicity (mutu; n = 306 samples) on a population of railroad workers (n = 87) with a range of diesel exhaust exposures. Postshift urinary mutagenicity was determined by a sensitive microsuspension procedure using Salmonella strain TA98 +/- S9. Number of cigarettes smoked on the study day and urinary cotinine were highly correlated with postshift urinary mutagenicity. Diesel exhaust exposure was measured over the work shift by constant-flow personal sampling pumps. Respirable particle concentrations were adjusted for the contribution of environmental tobacco smoke, as estimated from nicotine concentration on treated filters. The relative ranking of jobs by this adjusted respirable particle concentration (ARP) was correlated with relative contact the job groups have with operating diesel locomotives. After adjustment for cigarette smoking (active and passive) in multiple regressions, there was no independent association of diesel exhaust exposure, as estimated by ARP, with postshift urinary mutagenicity among smokers or nonsmokers. An important finding is the detection of "baseline" mutagenicity in most of the nonsmoking workers. Despite the use of individual measurements of diesel exhaust exposure, the absence of a significant association in this study may be due to the low levels of diesel exposure, the lack of a specific marker for diesel exhaust exposure, and/or urinary mutagenicity levels from diesel exposure below the limit of sensitivity for the mutagenicity assay.