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OTTAWA, September 28, 2010  —  The Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) has awarded a $258,000 two-year research grant to professor Glen Kenny of the School of Human Kinetics at the Faculty of Health Sciences, for research on the effects of heat stress on vulnerable workers (older adults and those with chronic disease) in Canada’s mining industry.

The Deep Mining Research Consortium and the Mines and Aggregates Safety and Health Association have identified heat stress as one of the most important risk factors affecting workers’ health and Safety in Ontario’s deep mechanized mines. Heat stress can have serious consequences for health, and can even cause death. The risk is even greater for older workers and those with Type 2 diabetes. The limited research to date demonstrates that aging and Type 2 diabetes can impair body cooling, as evidenced by a decrease in local sweating and skin blood flow during passive heat exposure. However, the separate and integrated influences of age and type 2 diabetes on the capacity to dissipate heat and the related risk of heat-illness and injury during physical work in the heat remain unresolved.

By studying the physiological responses elicited involuntarily by the human body to promote the dissipation of heat and directly measuring the subsequent heat exchange to the environment using the world’s only functional direct calorimeter, Dr. Kenny will develop a better understanding of how heat stress develops (from both a local and whole-body perspective) in Ontario’s most vulnerable miners. This will potentially allow for earlier prediction of its onset. A key outcome of this work will be the determination of exposure limits and work-rest schedules to protect against heat stress among the most vulnerable workers.