Patty's Industrial Hygiene, Hazard Recognition. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ development of exposure standards in the 1950s continued to propel the profession. In 1951, the Walsh–Healey Public Contracts Act was expanded to include Safety and Health Standards that recommended a list of 29 ACGIH TLVs, to be used “as a guide for allowable concentrations.” This was the first specific Federal regulatory standard that expanded upon the generic requirements (for ventilation and respirators where appropriate) contained within the Basic Safety and Health Requirements added in 1942 to the original Walsh–Healey Public Contracts Act of 1936 (38). Outside of the United States, the profession also grew in developed countries. In the United Kingdom, the British Occupational Hygiene Society (BOHS) was founded in 1953.

      In 1958, the AIHA published Hygienic Guides that included standards for 56 substances (39). This was the first time that the documented rationale behind the list of numerical TLVs exposure standards was widely published.

      2.5 1960s: Certification of Industrial Hygienists Provides a Mark of Professional Recognition

      In 1959, the Certification Committee of the AIHA recommended the establishment of a separate Board for certification of industrial hygienists, which became the American Board of Industrial Hygiene (ABIH). The 1960s saw the certification of 13 industrial hygienists, with 483 grandfathered by 1962. The first Certified Industrial Hygienist (CIH) examinations were held in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1963.

      In the 1960s, there was a great increase in the sampling of workplace exposures. Sherwood and Greenhalgh were considered the first to build a practical personal sampling pump in 1960 (40),(41). The methods of sample analysis also greatly improved over the course of the 1960s. A surge of improved and sophisticated techniques for quantifying workers' exposures to health stress agents also generally took place in the 1960s. This progress applied to both sample collection and analytical techniques which resulted in much lower levels of exposure to specific agents being detected and quantified. There also began a dramatic increase in toxicological and epidemiological studies by government, industry, universities, and foundations, directed to obtaining data upon which to base exposure standards as well as improve industrial hygiene practices.

      There had been significant differences in the methods of different industrial hygiene laboratories in the early twentieth century as well as among industrial hygienists conducting sampling in the field (42). Such significant differences continued well into the 1960s but began to be standardized (43). For example, fiber counting methods were standardized as of 1969 (44).

      Environmental/off‐the‐job stresses were increasingly noted as elements of industrial hygiene. There was increased acknowledgment that workers may encounter a host of health risks outside of places of work. Lifestyle stresses were increasingly recognized as having the potential for a profound influence on health. As noted previously in Section 2.4, Doll showed the correlation between lung cancer and cigarette smoking. In addition to the primary cause of lung cancer from the smoking of cigarettes, stresses from other activities may have additive, accumulative, and synergistic actions, or may exert superimposed responses on the effects of other exposures arising in places of work. Recognition that these off‐the‐job agents could be causes of respiratory, cardiovascular, renal, or other diseases, and that they may create grave health problems in individuals over and above any effects of exposures encountered in workplaces continued to evolve.

      The original authors of this chapter noted that a thought‐provoking concept on associations between environmental stresses and health decrements was developed by Professor Theodore Hatch and put forward in the 1960s. His concept examined associations between stresses and the human body's adjustments, compensations, and finally breakdown and failure, in response to them (45). The concept was considered particularly useful at the time in understanding the effects of multiple risk factors of both occupational and nonoccupational origin.

Determination of the effect of lower levels of exposure to a specific agent on the health of workers over a working lifetime, such as from nonoccupational sources, was and continues to be more difficult. Often this is done through extrapolation of other analogous data or by utilization of current retrospective exposure assessment techniques to estimate past exposures. In the lower range of the dose–response region, the incidence of disease from exposure to an agent may be so low that it approaches the level for that disease in the community outside the industry under study. This is thought to result in part from confounding exposures of the general population to risk factors such as smoking, alcohol consumption, drug use, hobby activities, community, and in‐house pollution. These incidental stresses may be similar in magnitude to those on the job, or may be additive, accumulative, or synergistic with stress from on‐the‐job exposures. For various reasons, often including limited study population size, even well‐controlled studies may not be sensitive enough to give sufficient data, which might be reliably extrapolated to the lowest dose–response region for lifetime exposures.

      By the end of the 1960s, the profession was still small with 647 CIHs certified by the ABIH.

      2.6 1970s: OS&H Legislation and Its Impact on the Industrial Hygiene Profession in Several Countries

      In the United States, passage of the OSHAct of 1970, which has the purpose of assuring “…so far as possible every man and woman in the nation safe and healthful working conditions …”, had a very broad bearing on the further development and practice of the industrial hygiene profession in the United States. The OSHAct and the regulations deriving from it have been substantial factors in the broad recognition and development of industrial hygiene as a science and a profession. The profession underwent tremendous growth in all of its concepts and technical aspects to meet its expanded responsibilities. Other industrialized countries had similar experiences in the professional recognition and growth of the science of industrial hygiene including the Roben's Report (UK) which led to the UK Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.

      In 1970, the US Department of Labor's newly‐formed Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) (46) greatly increased the demand for industrial hygienists. In April and May of 1971, OSHA published lists of construction and general industry permissible exposure limits (PEL) that adopted and superseded those in the 1969 Walsh–Healey standard.

      Standard methods of industrial hygiene practice continued to be established in the 1970s. For example, AIHA established its laboratory accreditation program in 1974 and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health published many analytical methods for use by industrial hygienists in 1974 (47), and the key elements of modern industrial hygiene exposure assessment were defined in 1977 by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in a sampling strategies manual (48).

      By the end of the 1970s, nonoccupational or public health hazards such as community exposures were generally considered to be aspects of industrial hygiene professional practice. While still a small profession, the 1970s saw the doubling of the number of CIHs from 647 at the end of the 1960s to 1750 by the end of the 1970s.

      Elsewhere in the world, there were similar concerns regarding the professional qualifications and the need for certification of professional hygienists. In the United Kingdom, the Institute of Occupational Hygienists was formed in 1975, and professional qualification came under the control of the British Examining and Registration Board of Occupational Hygiene (BERBOH) (49).

      2.7 1980s: Growth and Major Changes in the Nature of Industrial Hygiene Profession

      Increasingly, industrial hygienists became involved with allied fields in the management of aspects of environmental/community affairs in the 1980s. An example of the merging of industrial hygiene and environmental/community affairs in the 1980s, was the global chemical industry addressing opportunities for protection of the health and well‐being of both their employees and the СКАЧАТЬ