Sometimes we give interviews to folks in the press and the
message that is printed is different from the message that we provided. This did not happen in the subject article. Not only was it not distorted, it was
expertly woven into a coherent story given a broad base of other input. It was written by Ed Rutkowski (Editor in Chief
of the AIHA Synergist) who is obviously a good thinker and brilliant writer. He
interviewed me and a number of colleagues on the general subject of
occupational exposure limits (OELs). Even
though the subject is filled with technical and political nuance, Ed did a
masterful job of putting it all together into a very coherent picture.
I am reproducing below the 3 side-bar extracted quotes from
the piece to whet your appetite and encourage you to download it.
“People can actually look at [RBOELs] and get some idea
of the quantitative risk and, perhaps more importantly, the uncertainty around
that prediction.”
“One of the fundamental challenges for the industrial
hygiene profession moving forward is to help practitioners answer the question,
‘Which OEL should I use?’”
“Understanding and communicating the uncertainty
around those predicted risks and trying to be more open scientifically about
what we know and don’t know, would be big steps forward.”
The article is free to all online. All you have to do is put the following into a
Google search in either Chrome or Internet Explorer:
“synergist supplement september 2014 benchmarks 22-23”
In my experience, you will not find a better explanation of
the current state of OELs.
Dr. Jimmy Perkins and I have been working on an initiative
to get the dialog on OEL development moving forward. We call it (after a name provided by Frank
Hearl) Risk@OEL. Other work in my
one-man shop on worthy projects has caused me to drop the ball on this
temporarily this summer but I hope to pick it up again later this year or early
next year. It will definitely be the
topic of future blogs. In the meantime,
I would love to hear back from you, before or after you read the article, on:
How you see the current state-of-the-science or
state-of-affairs related to the OELs we use in the IH community in our efforts
to gauge the risk of the actual exposures we measure or estimate?
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