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Hospital pharmacists, technicians and nurses who prepare and give anticancer drugs handle compounds that work by damaging DNA. Gloves, closed vials and ventilated cabinets keep most of it away from them, but traces still get through: the drugs turn up on work surfaces, on the outside of vials, and in the urine of staff who never touched a patient's line. What that repeated low-level exposure does to the people doing the job is the open question. The usual way to look is a blood sample and a count of micronuclei, small fragments of chromosome left behind when a cell divides badly. Some studies find more of them in staff who handle these drugs than in colleagues who do not. Others find none at all. The groups are small, laboratories score the slides by different conventions, and the comparison group is sometimes other hospital staff and sometimes volunteers from outside. This project reads those studies as one body of evidence and asks what the disagreement between them is actually made of. Twelve weeks with papers, a table and a word processor.
Read up on occupational exposure to anticancer drugs and on how the micronucleus assay works. Take one part of the literature, read the papers for it, build the table that goes with it, and write that section of the review.
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