High ambient temperatures and work-related injuries

In the environmental epidemiology setting, dozens of time series studies have been used to link high ambient temperatures to daily counts of mortality or hospital admissions.1 ,2 In the occupational setting, studies looking at the effect of short-term exposure to high temperatures have focused on, for example, the occurrence of heatstroke cases in different occupational groups3 or the effects of high temperature on productivity.4 ,5 Xiang et al 6 used data from compensation claims to build a time series of daily work-related injuries, and then used time series techniques to examine how fluctuations in ambient temperature are associated with the number of daily injuries. In their study, ambient temperature was indeed associated with work injuries, but the shape of the association was not what one would expect a priori. We …