Spatial aggregation of different industrial facilities leads to simultaneous release of pollutant emissions. Our objective is to study cancer mortality risk associated with residence in the vicinity of pollutant factories. We used data on industries for year 2007 (3458 facilities). For the 8,098 Spanish towns, we defined a factor with 4 levels based on the number of factories in a radius of 2.5？km from the centroid of each town (industrial factor). We also used data of land cover use to approximate the percentage of municipal land used for industrial activities in each Spanish town (land-used variable). For both variables we fitted Poisson models with random terms to account for spatial variation. We estimated risk trends related with increasing number of factories or percentage of land used for industrial activities. We studied 33 cancer causes. For the industrial factor, 11 causes showed trend associated with increasing factor level. For the land use variable, 8 causes showed statistically significant risks. Almost all tumours related to the digestive system and the respiratory system showed increased risks. Thus mortality by these tumours could be associated to residence in towns nearby industrial areas with positive trend linked to increasing levels of industrial activity. 1. Background Exposure to pollution as a cause of cancer has been frequently studied. Studies using in vitro assay systems and biomarkers have proved mutagenic activity in air samples from urban and industrialized areas [1]. Important sources of pollution are emissions from industrial activity. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies as carcinogens substances and compounds present in air emissions from industrial facilities such as some heavy metals (cadmium, chromium, nickel and arsenic), Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) benzene or asbestos [2]. Spatial aggregation of factories in industrial estates is a common practice due to legal regulations or economic reasons. This spatial aggregation leads to simultaneous release of pollutant emissions from different industrial facilities over the same area. Potential hazardous effects of those emissions are an important issue from the Public Health point of view and research has been done upto the present date focusing on different diseases and populations, such as cancer, heart disease, mutations in children [1, 3–5]. The availability of direct measures would be the ideal tool for these kinds of studies [6, 7], unluckily in many situations this is still not possible. A more common option is using the geographical
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