Dacarbazine; Health-based calculated occupational cancer risk values

On request of the Minister of Social Affairs and Employment, the Dutch Expert Committee on Occupational Standards (DECOS), a committee of the Health Council of the Netherlands, estimates the additional cancer risk associated with occupational exposure to substances that have been classified by the European Union or the DECOS as genotoxic carcinogen. In this report the committee presents such estimates for dacarbazine, a genotoxic anticancer drug. For the estimation, the committee used the method described in the report ‘Calculating cancer risk due to occupational exposure to genotoxic carcinogens’ (Hea95).

The committee estimated that the additional lifetime cancer risk for dacarbazine amounts to:

• 4x10-3 for 40 years of occupational exposure to 90 mg/m3;
• 4x10-5 for 40 years of occupational exposure to 0.9 mg/m3.