| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 環境醫學研究所 === 89 === Gasoline is a volatile complex mixture of hydrocarbon compounds that may cause adverse health effects. Among the volatile organic compounds (VOCs)，benzene has been classified as a group I carcinogen by the International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC). To enhance octane number and reduce carbon monoxide emissions, methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) is added to unleaded gasoline (from 2 to 15% by volume) in Taiwan and many countries. At present, the evidence has been shown that MTBE is an animal carcinogen and possible human carcinogen. Our Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is concerned about this problem. In this study, we selected two gasoline service station in Tainan City being study subjects, and get the information about these gasoline service station workers'' ,such as smoking habits, health status, etc. from the questionnaire interview. We choose four gasoline stations in Tainan city and get the information about these gasoline service station workers'' smoking habits, health status, etc. from the questionnaire interview. The aims of this study were two：(1) measure personal VOCs exposure to evaluate their carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic risk ；(2) measure urinary S-PMA to assess the benzene exposure of gas station attendants and non-attendants and establish the correlation between biological markers（ S-PMA ）and atmospheric benzene concentration.
We divide the whole workers into attendants and non-attendants. The results shows that attendants exposed to higher concentration of VOCs than non-attendants (p<0.01). And the major volatile organic compounds of workers exposed were MTBE, toluene and benzene. The questionnaire survey shows the highest prevalence of illness symptoms is dizziness, and second is headache. The carcinogenic risk of attendants exposed to benzene was acceptable. And the cancer risk(testicular interstitial cell tumors) of attendants exposed to MTBE was higher than the acceptable reference value. In this study, there are about 40% workers who have smoking habits. The average S-PMA concentrations of smokers were higher than non-smokers. After controlling the smoking factor, the average S-PMA concentrations (end of shift urine) of attendants and non-attendants were 2.78mg/g creatinine and 1.31mg/g creatinine. And the average S-PMA concentrations (end of shift urine) of attendants were higher than non-attendants. The result shows that smoking maybe an important confounding factor in biological monitoring of benzene. The correlation between atmospheric benzene concentration and S-PMA concentration in end of shift urine excluding workers who smoked was : (S-PMA, mg/g creatinine) =0.011x（Benzene, μg/m3 ）+0.828 (n=22, r = 0.527, p = 0.012). It is concluded that the urinary level of S-PMA can be regarded as a useful marker for low level benzene exposure.
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