Alright welcome this will be a good first start sort of tiptoed into the lectures for
our industrial hygiene material it doesn't really fit into any of the individual units
that we are going to talk about in terms of physical agents but I thought based on my
experience in the spring teaching this class on campus I thought it be a good idea to add
a really short introduction on what is exactly industrial hygiene.
Although we have IH 1 and 2 they are typically taken by students in order some of you who
are coming in just starting out in the summer and this is your first semester IH class I
want to have some sort of an idea of what we are talking about.
It is going in very basic review so feel free to skip this unit if you want to.
There will be a couple basic questions we cover here on the exam so be on the lookout
for... camera moved you can only see my head well that's all right I'll readjust that okay
great so I just got to face the other camera no problem...
Alright so let's get started on the objectives.
I want you to be able to describe the five primary responsibilities of the industrial
hygienist.
I say five it's really four but the fifth one I am proposing a fifth one to you and
a fifth one has been proposed off and on by AIHA, ABIH, others, so only four on the CIH
and CSP.
So we'll talk about that.
Also I want you to know the three classes of hazards that industrial hygienists generally
work with and list some of the common agents within the physical class of hazards, which
is the one we are going to be focusing on this semester.
And understand the differences between exposure and dose.
So I will start off every lecture with objectives and we are going to end every lecture with
a summary.
I don't like it and I used to not do it however studies have shown that students really appreciate
knowing what we're trying to get out of this class and going over it and then summarize
what we learned that helps clear the intention.
So when you're thinking about studying for the exam these objectives would be very good
guides.
Alright so let's talk about health and safety that's what we're interested in as industrial
hygienists is keeping people healthy especially at the workplace.
This will probably look familiar to some people this is based on a little bit of old data.
I think 2004 but I checked for this lecture and it really hasn't fluctuated much so
in terms of new cases 94, 95, 96 percent of new incidents are acute injuries at work.
So were talking about say someone got hit by equipment, someone cut their finger...
right these are acute injuries and that makes up the vast majority of incidents in the work
place.
This little sliver 4%, 5%, 6% in that neighborhood is made up of everything else that happens.
OK, it's that little sliver where industrial hygienists really operate.
This is in the U.S. but it's true in other western countries where they have this type
of data.
So I jumped ahead a little bit.
What is industrial hygiene?
Industrial hygienist is a problematic name.
It is also called occupational hygiene in other places it does not have anything to
do with dental hygiene or necessarily keeping things clean.
From the perspective of an origin, industry means a systematic labor for some useful purpose
like creating goods and services for people, right, and hygiene is the Greek hygeia, which
was the God of Medicine.
So it literally means the
preservation and protection of health for people at work or involved in industry.
And when this term sort of came about it started to be used it was really I the early 1900s
and hygiene often referred to sanitation and sanitary conditions and environment health
professionals to this day are called sanitarians in some places.
So hygiene sanitation sanitary conditions are important for health but there are a lot
of other aspects of health that are important too, so yes we got 3 to 5% is where industrial
hygienists really operate everything else is safety.
Ok, so what makes up this 3 to 5%?
Well, the vast majority of those are ergonomic hazards so hazards related to lifting things
or you know damage over time that occurs from completing the same task; force, load, repetition.
You will all take advanced ergonomics course as part of this curriculum and we are going
to talk about ergonomics a little bit this semester and then with everything else.
So the next biggest chunk belongs to, remember this is a very small piece of pie in general,
the next biggest chunk is skin disorders and which generally relate to chemicals and allergens
some allergens would be considered as biologically agents but generally chemical exposure resulting
in effects on the skin.
We will talk about that in industrial hygiene one a lot.
And then everything else and probably the next biggest chunk is hearing loss related
to noise and that is a physical agent that we will be talking about this semester and
poisonings and respiratory diseases all fit into this little sliver.
So that's where industrial hygiene is focused and just because it's a small amount of the
overall picture doesn't mean that an absolute number it's not much larger.
If you have to think we'll be talking about epidemiology too but you have to think about
sort of incidence and prevalence as well a lot of acute injuries either resolve or result
in death so they don't persist over time some acute injuries like someone people for a long
time and it certainly happens a fall you could break a hip you can be suffering from that
for a long time lot of acute injuries either are resolved very quickly; people heal from
them or they result in some type of death unfortunately.
So the prevalence for injuries, if you will, is not quite this unbalanced compared to illnesses
because a lot of occupational illnesses last a very long time and cause significant suffering.
So even though the incidents might be low the prevalence of them is much higher.
And it's important work.
You might think gosh, why are we so focused on such a small chunk?
Well there's a lot fewer industrial hygienists out there then there are safety professionals
so this is a specialty within a pretty specialty industry.
So this is where we are.
Okay, so what is industrial hygienist what is industrial hygiene?
I try to break it down into four basic jobs and I'm going to say fifth in this class
but in terms of the CIH, CSP, and if anyone asked you there are the four that you need
to know: the anticipation of hazards, right?
The recognition of hazards.
The evaluation of hazards, and the control of hazards.
I've added this one here, communication.
it's one I like to include.
I think communicating information about the hazards and the evaluations and the controls.
It's critical that you not only need to communicate that to workers that you also
need to communicate those hazards to management and the public.
It is a very big part of the industrial hygienist's job.
But it's generally not included.
The big push recently is to add prevent, the word prevention.
That's fine.
I think it's good to think proactively preventing injuries and illnesses and even hazards from
developing in the first place that is certainly true.
I do think that prevention can be addressed at all of these other stages as well.
So these are the four that you must know and that's where industrial hygienists spend their
time.
If you are hiring an industrial hygienist or you were hired as a industrial hygienist
or something like that you will be spending your time doing this.
If you're not spending your time on those four things you are probably not doing a very
good job.
Ok, that is our focus so what does it mean?
...I don't know why that's there again...
What does it mean to anticipate a hazard?
I'm lumping anticipation and recognition together because I think there ones that students
struggle with the most.
How do I anticipate hazard?
How do I look into the crystal ball right and figure out what risk is to the worker,
what hazards are present, what is going to cause injuries and illnesses before that they
even occur?
Well we can't see into the future of course but it really involves knowledge of materials
and operations.
So some of that knowledge comes from classes, some of that knowledge is going to come from
experience, and you will learn.
You work at the same industry or if you're a consultant like I was working lots of different
industries you will learn to some extent sort of general industrial hygiene hazards that
a lot of these industries have so that's certainly a good start.
It's not all that there is a big big piece comes from doing research and the best first
place to start when your researching potential hazard trying to anticipate hazards in a particular
industry is to go on to government websites OSHA and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
You can find out the history of citations the most common citations of each industry,
and the types of injuries and illnesses that are occurring in each industry.
All that information is available so that's a really good first step.
NIOSH, OSHA, and other agencies also put together information on specific industries: health
care, certain aspects of agriculture, mining, MSHA, and any number of other agencies.
So researching what hazards and what processes are out there in similar industries or companies
is very crucial to anticipation.
Another sort of new buzzword but it's not a new concept is idea of prevention through
design.
That simply means engaging industrial hygienists and safety professionals during the design
phase before we have even built this facility or this process or whatever, we have sat down
with safety folks and industrial hygienists trying to think about what are these aspects
going to be and how can we control them in the design process.
This is usually more effective and more cost-effectiveness so that's that's huge and it's really this
idea of cradle-to-grave planning thinking about the raw materials of the process thinking
about how the process works thinking about what are the inputs and outputs along the
way, the mass balance and the waste products and even the final products, and how those
are even disposed.
So you, as a upcoming industrial hygienists/safety professional, should be trying to engage your
company and your client's in this way as much as possible.
So anticipation people struggle with it but it is not tricky it may be the most important
part.
Recognition is of course, well now these hazards exist but you could walk in
to workplace and you can spot things that other people can't.
Because of your training, because of your experience, right?
So you can have a site foreman, a general contractor, even investors walking around
constantly getting toured in and out of a new facility that's being built and they simply
will not see this stuff.
It takes a hygienist, it takes a safety professional to walk in and say these are problems and
these can result in injuries and this is what we need to do.
So, anticipation and recognition: don't struggle with it.
It's very important to always be thinking about that throughout your classes.
Alright so what about evaluation this is probably where you will spend most of your time studying
is the evaluation of hazards because its complicated.
There's a lot to taking measurements and ensuring that those are accurate and precise
and seeing what you can quantify out of that, turning that into risk, and turning that risk
into controls.
So you're going to spend a lot of time and training on evaluating hazards in the workplace
for sure.
Okay we need to measure when we are evaluating as an industrial hygienist.
Mostly we're measuring exposures to particular agents, whether they be some kind of chemical
in the air or whether they be some type of infectious agent or whether it be some type
of physical hazards like noise or barometric, right, so we have to figure out what the exposures
are to determine whether or not this is a problem and how we can best control it.
So exposures... usually one of the things that's problematic about exposures is they
tend to vary throughout the day, throughout the week, and even throughout the year, right.
So we look at a graph of time, let's say concentration of some chemical this is time increasing from
0 to X (often 8 hours) that's a typical work day and this is the concentration zero
to whatever.
Over the course of the day workers exposure might look like this so you have some relatively
low exposures, maybe they have to do some maintenance work and then maybe it goes back
to this, and maybe they take a break it's really low, and then it goes back up again.
So this is so this is some hypothetical continuous exposure so we evaluated.
This exposure level is over the course of this day we can see that it's variable, averaging
every little one second along this to create a very smooth graph.
Now, often we can't do that, we cant actually measure real-time what's happening every
second workers exposure.
We might if we end up lucky with the exposure situation.
This is where the best we can determine sort of small chunks of time.
We might have a couple of what's here, and then a high one, and this is you know probably
the same exposure, but it's not!
We don't have that good of a definition of time and concentration so it tells us information
about what this person was exposed to but not very well.
And the most common scenario is that we get some average so we don't see this, we don't
see this, we don't see this, and we just know when it averages up the total.
And that there's a lot of uncertainty when it comes to environmental sampling as part
of industrial hygiene and there's a lot of judgment.
Scientific judgment and professional judgment we have to use to equate this.
Sampling is usually laborious and cost intensive, and so if we only end up with this now, is
this one day of a person's year of exposure sufficient?
What about working at this job for 10 years, is that sufficient?
And so there's answers to all these questions you'll be learning them
throughout the semester.
We should also probably talk just very briefly exposure versus dose.
The difference you'll learn much more about this in industrial hygiene one but it is sort
of quick and dirty.
The difference between exposure and dose is one is the thing in your environment that
you are coming into contact with, that's an exposure, and dose is the amount of that
thing or substance or agent that has actually gotten into your body and is acting at the
site of action.
Usually industrial hygienists measure exposure to chemicals.
We can put a sample of what a person is exposed to on the filter in there breathing zone so
we could say hey they were exposed to X amount of particulate in this environment.
That doesn't mean that amount of particulate got into their lungs and reached the target
organ or if it was a chemical vapor that was absorbed into their bloodstream, traveled
throughout the body to the target organ and elicited an effect.
That's dose and we don't often know those things.
We usually only know exposures.
Now, in the case of physical agents, (which we are going to talk about this semester)
we often say that were measuring the dose.
That is semi-accurate.
The reason is that, in the case of noise, usually what we do is microphone on a person's
shoulder near there ear and we measure how loud it is at that point.
But the target organ of that is essentially the inside of the ear so we know that the
level measured near the ear outside of the head is actually pretty close to the level
inside the ear, although your ear can change that sound a little bit, it is pretty close.
The ear is the target organ for sound so we say the exposures equivalent to the dose,
and that's close enough for rock and roll anyways.
So that's why we say that.
Imagine for vibration as well.
Okay, this thing is vibrating, we can't measure easily what's happening in that
person's vasculature but we can put something in his hand and we could measure vibration
exposure to that hand.
And because, unless he has some type of a glove or unless he got some ear plug in his
ear, that exposure is going to be pretty close to dose he actually gets to the inside of
his hand, inside of his arm, inside of his chest, etc., and so physical agents we often
measure the dose but it's not perfect.
Most the time the industrial hygienist always assesses the exposure when it comes to chemical
and biological agents.
Alright so our last step the last main of the four main jobs is controls and we'll talk
about the hierarchy of controls in a lot of classes.
This is a very, this is the most simplistic version: engineering, administrative, controls,
PPE.
Engineering controls are the best and the most effective.
They're also I would say the least adopted.
Then you would have administrative controls and PPE, especially for physical agents in
particular, this is the frontline control a lot of people use but it's not the best.
Does the most solid engineering control you are actually building out this is for first
your isolating your equipment so that this produce the same level of hazard or substituting
so that's that's that.
Although administrative controls are trickier; you're rotating.
You got a hazardous level of exposure if someone is exposed to this level for eight hours a
day there going to be overexposed so you just rotate people in and out keep everyone from
becoming
overexposed.
But you potentially expose more people.
Also things like training or you do things like providing signs saying "warning do
not go in there" "this is radioactive ionizing radiation" warning sign.
I think it's pretty clear but it requires that someone read that, understand it, and
take appropriate action so they is not nearly as good as engineering controls because they
still often require decision-making by a person.
Of course PPE is really the worst although it's, although you've no doubt use your own
and no doubt require workers to wear it, this is really the worst.
If we could get rid of it you should.
People don't use PPE well, they often don't use it well or use it improperly, and it requires
a lot of training.
And folks who wear PPE tend to get injured anyway so its important as industrial hygienists
that we know this even though it should be used as a last resort.
I want to cover business communication.
This is my addition to the four major responsibilities.
I said it before you have to be able to talk to workers about what the risks and hazards
are especially physical agents which are virtually all invisible.
You can't see this hazard, but it's there, it could make you sick.
So it's hard to get that message across sometimes but you're going to have to learn how to
do it.
And you're going to need to be able to talk to the senior leadership, to the board members,
to the senior managers.
You have to learn how to make the business case for industrial hygiene, because the big-wigs
need to be convinced, if there's no money for it and they don't measure it, they don't
care about it, even with a lot of safety manuals and policies sitting on a bookshelf and collecting
dust you still got people getting hurt.
So that's going to be one of your challenges throughout this job.
I mentioned that we have three classes of hazards, three main, general classes of hazards
to deal with.
The first and largest one is probably chemicals.
Remember all those non-ergonomic hazards, skin disorders was the second most common
health hazard work in terms of incidents anyway, and by and large those are caused by chemicals.
50,000 chemicals commonly used in industry some say a hundred thousand.
We have TLVs, which are threshold limit values, developed by the American Conference of Industrial
Hygienists.
There are around 700 TLVs.
We also have PELs or OSHA permissible exposure limits.
These are enforceable law but there's even fewer.
An awful lot of chemicals have very sparse toxicological data, but guess what industry
doesn't stop development.
The next category is biological hazards, a lot certainly bacteria but also viruses are
infectious also things that cause allergic responses can be biological agents.
Finally, you have the physical agents and that's going to this the focus of our time
this semester.
So what are the physical hazards?
There will be a test question on this, there will be a comprehensive exam question on this,
I promise.
What are those classes of hazards?
You need to know what the physical hazards are.
Taking a whole course on it and not knowing this is just unacceptable.
If I asked you on exam or on a comprehensive exam what physical agents are I expect you
to know!
So
them let's go over now so that there's no question.
I'm sure you could look through it yourself but I will just go through it quickly.
First is noise, NIOSH estimates that five 30 million American workers are overexposed
to noise.
A lot of those people who are overexposed will develop hearing loss as a result of that
noise.
It is quite debilitating.
It has a very high economic toll as well.
We'll certainly be focusing on ionizing radiation as well.
We use it to generate power and it is amazing technology, but it's also very dangerous.
Nonionizing radiation as well is radiation that is not enough to produce ionizations
can still cause damage.
We will also be dealing with vibration.
Vibration that could be harmful to the body over periods of time, chronic exposures develops
chronic conditions related to vibration.
We will focus on human vibration exposure, but for anyone who takes my noise class noise
class we will be talking about equipment vibration as it relates to noise control.
Also very important are ergonomic factors.
Ergonomics is the number one health hazard in the workplace and you will have a course
on ergonomics.
I think its required but there's a lot more to be covered in a single course.
We'll be focusing on a couple of specific aspects of ergonomics that industrial hygienists
are supposed to know.
These are once that there is a TLV for.
Also, I'm adding a lecture on barometric stress so as the atmospheric pressure pressure
from being submerged in water increases or decreases from going high in altitude, that
could result health problems.
And finally, temperature extremes.
Hot and cold can really affect how the body functions if the body cannot maintain its
baseline temperature.
So those are all the physical hazards and we need to know these.
So what about cuts and burns?
Aren't those physical hazards?
Don't they physically interact with the body, yes, but it doesn't relate to an industrial
hygiene chronic long-term exposures with slow development of health problems, right?
These are acute safety hazards.
I think that's it.
So we talked about the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, controlling, and communication
of hazards.
As before you really need to know first four but I'd like you to think about the number
five, always.
We may also start to see prevention included more.
We talked about different hazard classifications, specifically physical hazards that we'll
talk about this semester.
So I hope this has not been not too painful for those that already know all this and a
helpful introduction for those who didn't.
We'll see you next time!
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