Manufacturing employees, especially those who work on the line, have a high risk of exposure to the novel coronavirus simply due to the nature of the job. Firstly, the distance between workers on assembly and production lines is often minimal.
The statistics are numbing. Drug overdoses killed 64,070 people in the U.S. in 2016. The death toll was up 21 percent over 2015. All indications are it will be even higher when the 2017 numbers are determined, according to the CDC. Overdoses are more than an epidemic; they’re a national crisis.
Whether chemicals are toxic, corrosive, reactive, flammable, emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs), or are even potentially explosive, the danger of accidental contact, even for short periods, can pose a severe hazard to workers.
An Ebola diagnosis for a healthcare worker at Texas Presbyterian Hospital who cared for a patient with the disease has the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scrambling to determine how she was exposed despite wearing a protective gown, gloves, mask and shield.
Most emergency shower and eye/face wash installations across North America do not comply with significant code provisions, even though the most recent ANSI Z358.1 Standard was released in 2009.
