Patty's Industrial Hygiene, Hazard Recognition. Группа авторов

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ means for assessing levels of agents in air early in the twentieth century is a case in point in the need for advancement in methods and technologies to improve the practice of exposure assessment and industrial hygiene. The first standard method to measure dust in the work environment was developed in 1916 (8),(9). As a more specific example, in 1918, the first measurement of worker exposure to asbestos was recorded in the industrial hygiene scientific literature by Smyth . It was recognized at this time that various kinds of dust exist, and the harmfulness of the dust depends on both the nature of the dust as well as the amount, with the results of Smyth referenced by Greenburg in 1921 (13). The Greenburg Smith impinger dust‐sampling instrument was introduced in 1922 (14). Other instruments, such as the konimeter, Owens Jet dust counter, electrostatic precipitator, and evacuated containers, also came into use during this period. By 1923, the movement for the betterment of industrial conditions had taken on an international character. In the United States, groundbreaking occupational disease texts were published by Dr. Alice Hamilton in 1925 (15) and 1934 (16). Still, beyond the early pioneers such as Dr. Hamilton, specific knowledge of the hazards and industrial disease risks prior to 1930, as perhaps best described by Greenberg, was convoluted and unclear (17).

      2.2 1930s: The Emergence of Industrial Hygiene as a Profession

      By the 1930s, medical doctors, engineers, and others with relevant skills in industrial hygiene practice had begun working more closely together. The early field studies beginning generally in the 1930s showed that when the very high exposures of workers were lowered, there was a corresponding lowering of the related disease incidence in workers. These and other studies gave support to the dose–response rationale upon which the practice of industrial hygiene is primarily based, that is, that there is a dose–response relationship between the extent of exposure and severity of biological response to most stressors and in which the response is observable at some point.

For example, the first major development in the industrial hygiene history of asbestos occurred in 1930 when Merewether (a medical doctor) and Price (an engineer with occupational hygiene skills) of the British Inspector of Factories, published a significant study on asbestosis in the asbestos textile manufacturing industry (18),(19). This publication served as the first analysis that showed a relationship between the airborne concentration of asbestos and the incidence of pulmonary fibrosis disease. The basic industrial hygiene control methods that are still standard today were identified by Merewether and Price (18) and were incorporated into the first regulations that became effective in 1932 to limit factory worker exposure to asbestos in Great Britain (20).

      The Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster in the 1930–1934 time period was a major event in increasing attention to industrial hygiene and occupational disease in the United States. In 1936, the US House of Representatives attributed 476 deaths to acute silicosis primarily from the drilling operations for the tunnel (21). By the late 1930s, the profession of industrial hygiene was emerging in the United States. In a 1937 book authored by medical doctors Ling and Nixon and printed in Great Britain, it was noted as the first sentence that “Industrial hygiene has in recent years come to assume an important place in both medicine and in industry” (22). In the United States, the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Walsh–Healy Act of 1936 had an immense impact on providing increased stability, incentive, and expanded focus in the practice of industrial hygiene. These Acts largely stimulated the creation of industrial hygiene programs in industry, foundations, educational institutions, insurance carriers, labor unions, and government that addressed the causes, recognition, and control of occupational diseases and incorporation of these programs as an integral part of management. These Acts established the philosophy that the worker had a right to earn a living without endangerment to health and were the forerunners for the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHAct) of 1970.

      In the US, the impact of Social Security funding significantly aided the development of the industrial hygiene profession in the 1930s. For example, studies similar to those of Merewether and Price were conducted in the United States later in the 1930s; notably, one in 1938 by the USPHS that established the first airborne standard for asbestos dust and provided important information on the effectiveness of engineering controls in the workplace such as ventilation systems . This USPHS‐funded study was noted as one of the first uses of the newly available Social Security funds in the United States.

      The establishment of professional associations to support the interests and growth of the profession has also played an important role in developing industrial hygiene as a science. The Michigan Industrial Hygiene Society (MIHS) and the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) were founded in 1938. The American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) was organized in 1939 and held its first annual conference that year and every year thereafter except 1945 (26).

      Beyond those working in the USPHS, there were few industrial hygiene professionals in the United States in the 1930s, with a count by MIHS noting 160 members of AIHA as of 1940 with 32 or 20% in the Detroit area (26). It has been noted that Warren Cook estimated that there were only about 300 industrial hygienists in the United States in 1939 (27). One of the few industrial companies that had such capable professionals included the Standard Oil Company. The first major study of dust in the petrochemical industry was conducted by Bonsib in 1937 (28). Bonsib and his industrial safety and hygiene colleagues were clearly pioneers in such matters. Bonsib's report on such dusts predated even the first major USPHS study of the asbestos textile industry in 1938 (24). The report by Bonsib included measurements of at least 17 different kinds of dust but was generally focused on silica dust.

      2.3 1940s: Publication of National Exposure Standards and Texts Buoyed the Profession

      A book that included a foreword by Alice Hamilton and authored by Teleky in 1947, an authority on occupation hygiene in Europe at the time, provides a summary of the history of industrial hygiene from World War I to World War II (29). World War II was a major force in the development of the industrial hygiene profession. In 1943, the Division of Industrial Hygiene of the USPHS produced the Manual of Industrial Hygiene and Medical Service in War Industries. In 1940, the Industrial Hygiene section of the Industrial Medical Association first published the Journal of Industrial Medicine's Industrial Hygiene, and the AIHA began publishing the American Industrial Hygiene Quarterly. In 1942, the National Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists published a list of Maximum Acceptable Concentrations for a wide range of industrial materials as recommended by various State industrial hygiene units . In 1943, Alice Hamilton's book Exploring the Dangerous Trades was published (33). In 1945, the previously compiled list of various US state standards in place at the time was published by Warren Cook (34). In 1946, the ACGIH published the first Maximum Allowable Concentrations (by 1948 known as Threshold Limit Values [TLVs]) for workplace exposures to a wide range of 144 materials (35). TLVs were intended at the time, and continue to be today, concentrations at which “nearly all workers can be employed for their entire working lifetime without adverse effect.” (35) In 1948, the first edition of Patty's Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology was published (36). Patty's remains to this day a seminal publication and standard reference of the industrial hygiene profession.

2.4 1950s: The Growth of Employment of Industrial Hygienists in General Industry

      The 1950s saw the increasing development of industrial hygiene programs within industry, particularly in large organizations. It was a time of growing concern about public and occupational health due to the noted increasing rates of cancer in the US populations. In 1953 in the United Kingdom, Doll published the first epidemiology study of the alarming increase in the rate of deaths from lung cancer. Several suspected causative factors were considered, and the result was a direct correlation between lung cancer and the smoking of cigarettes (37).

      The first AIHA technical committees (air pollution, analytical chemistry, noise, and radiation) were formed, indicative of the broadening purview at that time of industrial hygiene to include environmental affairs as well as health physics.

СКАЧАТЬ