Environmental Health and Safety

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President Trump’s nomination of R. Alexander Acosta to be secretary of labor was approved by a Senate committee, even though the nominee’s (confirmation hearing) testimony had left unclear whether he would be more interested in protecting employers’ prerogatives than in guarding workers’ interests.

Control banding is an assessment method that can be used to manage workplace risks. It is a process that matches, for example, a control measure (e.g., ventilation, engineering controls, containment, etc.) to a range or "band" of hazards (e.g., skin/eye irritation, very toxic, carcinogenic, etc.). The control banding method also groups chemicals according to similar physical or chemical characteristics, how the chemical will be handled or processed, and what the anticipated exposure is expected to be.

What is "indoor air quality"? Indoor air quality (also called "indoor environmental quality") describes how inside air can affect a person's health, comfort, and ability to work. It can include temperature, humidity, lack of outside air (poor ventilation), mold from water damage, or exposure to other chemicals. Currently, OSHA has no indoor air quality (IAQ) standards but it does provide guidelines about the most common IAQ workplace complaints.

Chemistry professor Katherine Mirica and Dartmouth former postdoctoral fellow and senior scientist at technology startup C2Sense Merry Smith have developed a conductive smart fabric capable of detecting and protecting users from toxic gases. The innovation, named “Self-Organized Framework on Textiles,” improves on a previous sensor technology-related project that Mirica and Smith previously collaborated on, Mirica said.

Hospital workers who used a disinfectant reported more incidents of work-related wheeze and watery eyes than those who did not use the product. Hospital workers who used a disinfectant reported more health symptoms than workers who did not use the product, reports a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) study published in the American Journal of Infection Control.

At a private meeting in September, congressional aides asked Rebeckah Adcock, a top official at the Department of Agriculture, to reveal the identities of the people serving on the deregulation team she leads at the agency. Teams like Adcock’s, created under an executive order by President Trump, had been taking heat from Democratic lawmakers over their secrecy. What little was publicly known suggested that some of the groups’ members had deep ties to the industries being regulated.