Document bBNB7ak8aEN2D973nzk7JwEok

mm WITH T33E HB939 Most of the controversy surrounding the Occupational Safety and Health Adminis tration has centered on the agency's safety rides, i,e., with accident prevention. Hut the new law also established a two-part program to eliminate occupational health hazards. And this may create even more complicated problems for the nation's employers. The conditions that threaten accidents are usu ally easily recognized. Tint chemicals and other toxic agents that workers must handle and breathe are sometimes ditlicult to per ceive. Even when health hazards are obvious, only experts can measure them accurately --and even they cannot always predict the long-term effects. Today, by some estimates, a new chemical goes into industrial use every twenty minutes. The toxic effects of many of these chemicals are unknown. OSHA itself has responsibility under the law to find occupational threats to health. Unfortunately, its staff is woefully inade quate: fifty full-time industrial hygienists are scattered thinly across the country. This fact reflects a national shortage of such spe cialists. One OSIIA official says there are only 560 certified industrial hygienists in the U.S., with 1,400 others in training but not yet certified. "To do the job well," he adds, "we would need 8,000 to 9,000." Even if the new agency had all the hy gienists it needs, it would still be far from solving the problem. For the government has been laggard in conducting the research needed to identify hazardous substances and to establish the human tolerance levels for them. Until passage of the OSHA law, the federal government's annual expenditure for studying occupational health hazards never topped $18 million. The law creating OSHA upgraded the De partment of Health, Education, and Wel fare's long-established Bureau of Occupa tional Safety and Health to the status of National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). But its budget re mains at a modest level ($30 million this fiscal year) and it is still under the control of HEW--which, critics charge, never showed much interest in occupational health prob lems in the past. Dr. Marcus M. Key, the director of the institute, says that its biggest problem is that, although it is a scientific organization whose personnel must be quali fied to carry out sophisticated research, the average grade level (hence, salary level) of its 700-man staff can be no higher than that of IIEW's enormous staff of bureaucrats Nevertheless, it is NIOSH's job to pro vide the research that will enable OSHA t< regulate exposure to hazardous substance and conditions. It's a formidable task. Seien tists have identified some 16,000 potentiall; toxic substances, and human tolerance level have been established for only about 400 o; them. These "threshold limit values"---de fined as the concentrations to which mos! workers can be exposed in an average work day without adverse effects--were previously set by the American Conference of Govern mental Industrial Hygienists. NIOSH mus; redefine all of the TLV's, which union critic, insist are much too permissive. Counting the fibers In the year and a half since it started work, NIOSH has been able to establish ha zard criteria for only five substances and conditions--asbestos, carbon monoxide, beryllium, noise, and heal. Eventually, Dr Key hopes to turn out criteria for fifteen t>. twenty materials a year, but even that level of production seems inadequate. The experience with asbestos indicates just how difficult setting standards can be Dr. Irving J. Selikoff of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, the leading researcher into the effects of asbestos, as serts that even brief exposure to small quan tities of the ubiquitous insulating materiai can produce lung cancer. His studies have already resulted in a ban on spraying tinmaterial on the steel framework of new buildings in a number of cities. When OSHA's initial standards fixed a limit of twelve asbestos fibers per cubic centimetei of air, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.--citing Dr. Seiikoff's work--registered outrage. Last Febru ary, NIOSH proposed that the limit be lowered to five fibers right away and, after two years, to two fibers. In June OSHA set the standard at five fibers per cubic centi meter for four years, two fibers thereafter. Neither labor nor management is satisfied with the result. An official of the Asbestos Information Association claims that com panies using the material will have to spend $150 million on new equipment in order to comply. A number of companies, in fact, have abandoned asbestos in favor of other insulating material. Yet Dr. Selikoff insists that even the two-fiber standard means "coming decades of disease and death in American industry." 116 FOnT'JNC November 19/2 HWBUI0013667