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It is not always sunny to take the plane.
If you even sit in the wrong place, you are more likely to get sick. And for flight attendants who spend most of their time in the air, there can be health risks.
In a study published Monday in the journal Environmental Health, researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan's public health school found that flight attendants were more likely to have cancer than the general population.
Compared to the general population, here is how cancer rates compare among flight attendants:
- Breast cancer: 3.4% in the flight crew, 2.3% in the general population
- Uterine cancer: 0.15% in the flight crew, 0.13% in the general population
- Cervical cancer: 1.0% in the flight crew, 0.70% in the general population
- Gastrointestinal cancer: 0.47% in the flight crew, 0.27% in the general population
- Thyroid cancer: 0.67% in the flight crew, 0.56% in the general population
Women who did not have children or who had three or more had a higher risk of breast cancer the longer they stayed at work.
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Here's how compared cancer rates for male flight attendants:
- Melanoma skin cancer: 1.2% in the flight crew, 0.69% in the general population
- Skin cancer without melanoma: 3.2% in the flight crew, 2.9% in the general population
The authors used self-reported data from 5,366 US flight attendants and compared them to those of a group of 2,729 men and women with the same economic status who participated in the national survey. health and nutrition.
The reason for the higher cancer rates among flight attendants, the authors suggested, boils down to a number of factors related to their jobs. Flight attendants are likely exposed to probable carcinogens in the cabin environment, including cosmic ionizing radiation at the flight altitude. They might also experience circadian rhythm disruption due to irregular work schedules and time zone changes. Poor air quality in booths and high levels of second-hand smoke before implementing in-flight smoking bans can also contribute to cancer risk.
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