The future of occupational hygiene?

Last week I was over at the American Industrial Hygiene Conference and Exhibition (AIHce) in San Antonio, Texas. It was my first time at this event and it was a great experience. This year is the 75th anniversary of the American Industrial Hygiene Association so this was an opportunity to look back on what the

Dust Exposure

There are many common industrial processes which cause workers to be exposed to a wide range of toxic and harmful dusts. Although official statistics are hard to come by, John Cherrie of the Institute of Occupational Medicine has estimated that in Great Britain almost 10 million workers are exposed to dust at work. Handling of

Putting measurements into context

A copy of William Blakes’s iconic monotype print of Isaac Newton is one of the works selected by Marianne Faithfull  for the DLA Piper Series: Innocence and Experience, exhibition  being shown at Tate Liverpool until 2 September. It’s unusual for scientists to be portrayed in art, and at first glance Newton appears as a heroic

Sampling for Sulphuric Acid Mist

Tomorrow I’m travelling over to Leeds to attend a seminar organised by the Chemical Industries Association seminar  on Controlling and Measuring Occupational Exposure to sulphuric acid mist. I’ll be making a brief presentation on sampling methodologies. I’ve uploaded a copy of the presentation to my Slideshare site, and it can be viewed below. Exposure to

Workplace Exposure Limits

There are a number of reasons why occupational hygienists carry out workplace exposure monitoring, but in the majority of cases the primary objective will be to determine the degree of risk due to inhalation so that we can decide on whether exposure is adequately controlled. In such cases we need a benchmark against which the

How many samples?

As I’ve discussed in a previous post, there are many factors which lead to a wide variation in exposure for workers carrying out the same job. One implication of this is that it is very dangerous to draw conclusions from one or two samples. But how many samples need to be taken to ensure that

Some implications of exposure variability

In our last post we saw how inhalation exposures to hazardous in the workplace are highly variable. The spread of results from an air sampling survey is usually quite wide and will usually conform to a skewed log-normal distribution. This means that although there is a large spread of results the majority of exposures are

Variability in exposure measurements

Whenever an occupational hygienist carries out an air sampling survey, either for a group of workers carrying out the same tasks in a similar way, or for the same individual worker carrying out the same job on different days, it’s inevitable that a range of results will be obtained.  However, although most people would probably

Exposure Modelling

This month we’ve been running revision courses for both the BOHS Certificate oral exam and the Diploma exam. I particularly enjoy being involved in the latter as it’s not often that I get the chance to sit down and talk advanced occupational hygiene with a group of experienced practitioners from different backgrounds for a whole

Lead exposure during soldering

“Soft soldering” is a widely used technique in the electronics industry for joining electronic components to printed circuit boards. Traditionally the solder was an alloy of lead and tin, typically containing about 40% lead.  It is well known that lead is a highly toxic metal, potentially causing a wide range of harmful effects. Children are