AOEC Exposure Codes
This exposure coding system was developed by Katherine Hunting, PhD, MPH and Susan McDonald, MS, CIH of George Washington University's Occupational Medicine Group, for the Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics with support through NIOSH Cooperative Agreements U60/CCU306169 and U50/CCU309667.

Included below is the AOEC exposure code system, as well as the Criteria for Designating Substances as Occupational Asthmagens (below) on the AOEC List of Exposure Codes and a table of the codes AOEC deems to be asthmagens based on these criteria.

On-line Instant Look-up, new November 2002

Questions on this new feature?: Gary Greenberg

This online engine will generate a list of matching codes for any character string entered.
 
 

Eg: Type: " methane " and your results you'll find will be formatted like this:


Search mode:"AND""OR"

Searches can include:

Physical agents (eg radiation), chemical classes (eg. hydrocarbons), activities (eg repetitive movement)
 
 

Once you find a particular code, you may want to enter the non-decimal portion again, to see the whole class, eg 260 for Diisocyanate agents.
 
 

AOEC Coding System: Downloadable Look-up Options

• The codes themselves, in table format, are available as an MS-Excel formatted table.

For offline lookups, the data and a search tool are combined into packages for downloading, using the commonly available WinZIP program, which compresses and combines data files into tight bundles. This allows more accurate and faster data exchange over communcations channels. Many other programs are available to un-pack these bundles, including free programs including IZArc and Macintosh systems.

• The AOEC Exposure Code Lookup Program (click to download) runs on Windows-based computers, without need for your own database program. This un-zips to become an executable file and includes both indices and the actual dBase files. Instructions for receiving and installing these files are below.

Simply curious how it works? A sample page, encoded into HTML for web-viewing is also available in this web-area.
 

Instructions ( from AOEC's office staff ):

AOEC Exposure Code LookUp
 
 
 
 

Installation Instructions

1) Download: AOEC Exposure Code Look-Up Program to a holding directory (eg C:\TEMP).
 
 

2) Open the downloaded .zip file using one of the unZIP programs mentioned above. Extract the files to some directory you'll be able to access (eg C:\TEMP)
 
 

3) Run the included installation program (If you follow the steps above, it'll be at C:\TEMP\SETUP.EXE .)
 
 

4) Unless you choose otherwise, the entire list of necessary files will all be placed in the subdirectory C:\AOEC_EXP.
 
 

5) You need to run the program called C:\AOEC_EXP\EXPOSURE.EXE. Its icon looks like:
 
 

6) You may want to create a Windows shortcut to this program in a special folder or on your desktop.
 
 

Explanatory Protocol: Criteria for Designating Substances as Occupational Asthmagens on the AOEC List of Exposure Codes

MSWord Document or  Acrobat File

(Revised April, 2005, reflecting suggestions of AOEC and NIOSH reviewers, and SENSOR participants)

= file requires Acrobat Reader, free download from Adobe
 
 

William S. Beckett M.D., M.P.H.
bill_beckett@urmc.rochester.edu
University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry