Environmental Health and Safety

RSS

The American Industrial Hygiene Association is pleased to support the Society for Chemical Hazard Communication's professional development training, HazCom Registry Preparation, in Las Vegas, Nevada. The course, designed for hazard communication professionals preparing to sit for the Safety Data Sheets & Label Authoring Registry competency assessment, will be presented on March 16-17 by Robert Skoglund, Ph.D., DABT, CIH; Denese A. Deeds, CIH, FAIHA, SDSRP; Douglas Eisner, M.S.; Chandra D. Gioiello, M.S., CIH; and Robert Roy, Ph.D., DABT.

Female nurses who administer antineoplastic drugs – medications used to treat cancer – don’t always wear protective clothing, according to a new NIOSH study published online in the American Journal of Nursing, accompanied by a video abstract. This is one of the first studies to explore the use of antineoplastic drugs and personal protective equipment among non-pregnant and pregnant female nurses.

The National Safety Council has posted an online version of the Injury Facts reference book for safety statistics. The free resource features a section on workplace safety that includes work-related injury and fatality trends, and how to benchmark an organization's injury and illness incidence rates with national averages.

The increasingly competitive marketplace of products related to occupational safety and health offers up a continuing cornucopia of goods and services, emerging technology and ways to address emerging risks. How do you make your company’s products stand out from the rest of the pack?

A World Health Organization (WHO) report, published late last year, highlighted the latest scientific evidence linking exposure to air pollution to adverse health effects in children. It wrote that although air pollution is widely recognized as a major health threat causing about 7 million premature deaths worldwide each year, the critical aspect that it is affecting children in uniquely damaging ways is often overlooked.

A week after a similar incident killed people in Nigeria, a pipeline explosion in Mexico has claimed 85 lives, and injured 58, with dozens more still missing. According to news sources, the disaster occurred as people filled containers with gasoline from a pipeline that was illegally punctured. Fuel theft is widespread in Mexico, causing pipelines to be shutdown repeatedly for the repair of punctures.

Evidence from NIOSH surveillance studies indicates gaps in hospitals’ respiratory protection programmatic operations and healthcare workers’ (HCWs) marginal compliance with respiratory protection recommended practices.

Pollution at London Underground tube stations is up to 30 times higher than in busy roads in the capital, research has found, potentially putting the health of staff and thousands of London commuters at risk. The Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP) said there is “likely” to be some health risks associated with the high concentrations of particulate matter (PM) on the London Underground network.

An environmentally friendly diet proposed by scientists that would radically transform food production and the types of food we eat; how the shutdown is affecting federal workers’ mental health and a look back at one of the strangest and deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history. These were among the top stories featured on ISHN.com this week.

Cleaning and disinfecting products are complex mixtures of chemicals that can irritate the skin. Evidence also shows that exposure to these products may increase the risk of work-related asthma among healthcare workers. But the effects of specific chemicals remain unclear. Now, a NIOSH study published in the journal Annals of Work Exposures and Health has added to our understanding by linking products and tasks to specific exposures.