Do industrial hygienists underestimate exposures by taking small sample bases?
At the AIHce 2018 Donald E. Cummings Memorial Award Lecture, Mark Stenzel, CIH, FAIHA, argued that industrial hygienists should place greater emphasis on estimating exposures relative to conducting sampling. Stenzel, an industrial hygiene consultant and the 2018 recipient of AIHA’s Cummings Award for outstanding contributions to the knowledge and practice of industrial hygiene, made his remarks on the final day of AIHce EXP 2018.
Stenzel’s lecture, “Modernization of the Exposure Assessment Process,” criticized what he described as a tendency of industrial hygienists to rely too heavily on a small number of samples to characterize exposures. This over-reliance reflects a mistaken belief that sampling and comparing the results to an occupational exposure limit represents the “gold standard” of exposure assessment, Stenzel said. Calling such an approach “heavily biased,” Stenzel argued that it causes industrial hygienists to underestimate exposures.