"It's time to ring the bell and say 'wake up'," says Director of OSHA's Health Response Team in Salt Lake City, Bob Curtis. For far too long, employers, the industrial hygiene community, and the agency itself have been ignoring a critical health and safety hazard, he says. But now OSHA is gearing up to do something about it.
The hazard? Surface contamination. More precisely, Curtis is talking about workers' dermal exposures to toxic substances--thousands of chemicals posing risk of ingestion, absorption or skin irritation--that accumulate on work benches, floors, equipment, tools, table tops, or innumerable other work surfaces.