DEVELOPING and implementing a comprehensive industrial hygiene strategy can be daunting even under the best circumstances. Ensuring proper characterization, prioritizing actions, performing monitoring, and interpreting the results requires process knowledge, technical skills, sufficient personnel, and of course, money.
AT 10:18 a.m., the rumble and roar of a Tuesday morning earthquake has just collapsed a 10-story downtown building housing offices for more than 600 people. You jump when the silence is shattered by the dispatcher toning out a report of a missing 4-year-old child, last seen playing in her backyard.
PREVENTION of work-related health complaints should be a top priority for occupational health professionals. Diagnosis and treatment of workers presenting with work-related problems represents an opportunity to prevent recurrences in those workers (tertiary prevention), to mitigate the effects of current work-related hazards in order to reduce the duration of the problem (secondary prevention), and to prevent the same problems in co-workers and those in similar jobs (primary prevention).
PROSPECTS couldn't be brighter for the automated external defibrillator market than they are right now. Liability concerns have receded thanks to "Good Samaritan" laws; new AEDs are lighter, smarter, more capable, and as much as 25 percent cheaper than older models; a battery of important authorities, from OSHA to the General Services Administration, the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and the Building Owners and Managers Association International, are urging widespread deployment.
SHOWERS of falling ash and cinders blow onto TV crews reporting a fire. The next day, an arson investigator digs in the charred remains of that fire. A crime scene investigator takes blood samples and fingerprints for analysis from a brutal murder, while demolition crews work amid clouds of dust, concrete, and metal particles.
MOST experts agree safety incentive programs can be effective tools for helping to motivate and encourage employees to achieve behavioral changes on the job. Most often, such programs are aimed at reaching multiple goals.
CRITICS of safety incentive programs often fall prey to a simple error in logic: They argue that because such programs do not always work, then they never work. If that is true, then the following statements must also be true:
REQUESTS are increasing from safety professionals for technical information on every type of glove made. As an R&D professional for a major glove manufacturer, I find these questions are becoming more commonplace.
ASTHMA is an illness characterized by intermittent breathing difficulty including chest tightness, wheezing, cough, and shortness of breath. It is a serious and sometimes fatal condition. Occupational asthma is defined as asthma caused by workplace exposures to biological agents.
THE Seven Deadly Sins (vanity, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth) are more than 17 centuries old but were not codified until the sixth century by Pope Gregory the Great. These sins were identified around the same time the Bible was being translated and are found throughout--from Genesis to Revelation.
ALL or nothing: This is what lockout/tagout (29 CFR 1910.147 in the OSHA catalogue) comes down to. "You"--with a gesture indicating the newbies as well as the old hands at work, because you cannot cut any slack for experience--"you are in, or you're out. You are with us, or you're against us. There's no middle ground."
MY interest and attention to ergonomics began as the consequence of managing workplace injuries within the Risk Management division of a large high-tech company 10 years ago. Ergonomics was still relatively new and unproven to our immediate industry, and I was extremely skeptical of how injuries could be reduced by placing monitors on phone books or putting a piece of foam rubber in front of a keyboard.
WHEN a hazardous materials accident occurs, time is a precious commodity. How long it takes responders to secure the scene could mean the difference between life and death.
IN the middle of 2001, Hewlett-Packard made a decision to change the way it addressed ergonomics in its office environments. HP had two goals: decrease the rate of repetitive strain injuries (RSIs) corporate-wide and create significant administrative efficiencies.
IN previous articles (March and June 2003), we discussed how companies can evaluate their response to terrorism and provided some insight into the types of weapons that terrorists may use. Some recommendations for hardening the facility were provided in the second article.
BACKUP alarms are installed on forklift trucks because they provide notice to a worker that a forklift is in close or immediate proximity. If they worked perfectly--and they don't--they might prevent as many as 20 deaths per year from pedestrian-forklift accidents and reduce injuries by seven thousand or more.
DR. Jeffrey W. Runge of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration--the nation's top auto-safety regulator--suggests that if 90 percent of Americans wore seat belts, then 6,600 lives would be saved each year, and that the failure to wear seat belts costs society more than $26 billion annually (The Wall Street Journal, 2003).