SETIL: Italian multicentric epidemiological case-control study on risk factors for childhood leukaemia, non hodgkin lymphoma and neuroblastoma: study population and prevalence of risk factors in Italy.

Background: Aetiology of childhood leukaemia and childhood neoplasm is poorly understood. Information on the prevalence of risk factors in the childhood population is limited. SETIL is a population based case-control study on childhood leukaemia, conducted with two companion studies on non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (NHL) and neuroblastoma.

Radionuclides in drinking water: the recent legislative requirements of the European Union.

In November 2013, a new EURATOM Directive was issued on the protection of public health from the radionuclide content in drinking water. After introducing the contents of the Directive, the paper analyses the hypotheses about drinking water ingestion adopted in documents of international and national organizations and the data obtained from national/regional surveys. Starting from the Directive's parametric value for the Indicative Dose, some examples of derived activity concentrations of radionuclides in drinking water are reported for some age classes and three exposure situations, namely, (i) artificial radionuclides due to routine water release from nuclear power facilities, (ii) artificial radionuclides from nuclear medicine procedures, and (iii) naturally occurring radionuclides in drinking water or resulting from existing or past NORM industrial activities.

Considerations on the ICRP model predictions of the transfer of (137)Cs from food to the milk and urine of lactating mothers.

A recent work has shown that the current ICRP biokinetic model for the transfer of caesium radionuclides from food to human breast milk was able to describe with satisfactory accuracy (137)Cs activity concentrations in human breast samples collected a few weeks after the Chernobyl accident as well as in samples collected some years later. However, systematic discrepancies were observed for the predictions of the activity concentrations in urine samples. In the present work, modifications to the model were investigated with the aim of improving the agreement between model predictions and data.

Risk of childhood leukaemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma after parental occupational exposure to solvents and other agents: the SETIL Study.

Aim: In the context of the Italian Multicentric Epidemiological Study on Risk Factors for Childhood Leukaemia and Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma (SETIL), the risk of childhood cancer was investigated in relation to parental occupational exposures.

Methods: All cases of childhood leukaemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) in children aged 0-10 years were identified. Controls were chosen at random from the local population in each region.

Validation of the ICRP model for caesium intake by lactating mothers with Italian data after the Chernobyl fallout.

In the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, a research group of the Italian National Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanità) carried out two research programmes on maternal milk. One concerned the transfer of caesium radionuclides from the diet to breast milk. In the other, the activity concentrations of (137)Cs were also determined in urine and placenta.

Thorium series radionuclides in the environment: measurement, dose assessment and regulation.

Environmental radioactivity research is more advanced for the (238)U series than for the (232)Th series, for a number of reasons. One reason is that some radionuclides of the (232)Th series are more difficult to measure than the corresponding isotopes in the (238)U series, and measurement techniques are less widely available. The (232)Th series population doses, however, are sometimes significant.

Persistent environmental contaminants in human milk: concentrations and time trends in Italy.

Breast milk monitoring studies of persistent and toxic environmental contaminants are of primary importance for carrying out an adequate risk assessment at the actual levels of human exposure and represent a major source of information on infant perinatal exposure. Milk specimens from mothers of the general population of the Venice and Rome areas were collected over the 1998-2001 period, pooled, and analyzed for selected persistent organic pollutants such as polychlorodibenzodioxins (PCDDs), polychlorodibenzofurans (PCDFs), polychlorobiphenyls (PCBs), organochlorinated pesticides (p,p'-DDE, p,p'-DDT, hexachlorobenzene), and polybromodiphenyl ethers (PBDEs), and the heavy metals Cd, Co, Cu, Hg, Mn, Pb, Sn, and Zn. The goal was to verify whether mother milk from the Venice area, whose lagoon is partly under direct industrial impact, had a contaminant load greater than that from the Rome area, primarily urban.