Zamboni drivers may be at higher risk for cancer: Study

Canada’s love of hockey runs so deep it’s hard to imagine a reasonably sized community not having an ice rink to play on.

In fact there are so many arenas and rinks in the country, it has the world’s highest number of zambonis –the monstrous, humming machine that comes out between periods to make the ice smooth and slick for players’ blades to glide across.

But one Cape Breton hockey fan – who is an Oncologist by day – has discovered a connection between the ice cleaners and cancers.

Dr. Ron MacCormick was never fond of the fumes the machines give off and usually left the bleachers when the zamboni rolled out.

After some thought about why he didn’t like the smell, he began to consider what health issues the chemicals used to clean the ice might have on people.

“I had a sense,” MacCormick says, “that I was seeing people who had spent a lot of time in rinks may be presenting with more cases of lung cancer and various other malignancies. But this was only a sense: I had nothing that could support this.

He put together a study group of 72 zamboni operators.

Some of them had spent as many as 27,000 hours at ice rinks and possibly as much as 5,000 hours on the ice.

He found out that four of those individuals had cancer, or 5.56 per cent of them.

“In this current population I found a minor trend towards increase in cancers, but I certainly didn’t find any statistically significant increase,” MacCormick explains.

While the number isn’t big enough to support his theory, he believes it is enough to warrant further study.

He thinks it’s worth examining, for the sake of the hockey-loving population.

There are 10 times as many rinks in Canada as there are in the United States: In Saskatchewan alone there are more rinks than in all of Russia.

“What happens inside a rink could be considered a public health issue more than any other country in the world.”

MacCormick doesn’t yet have the funding for a larger study, although he would like to continue monitoring the health of the zamboni drivers from this first.