A New Paradigm for Workplace Air Sampling and Cost-Effective Exposure Assessment

 描述(申请人提供)：空气中的化学和生物危害对我国的职业病负担有很大影响。然而，监测劳动力暴露在这些危险中所需的资源是稀缺的。具有讽刺意味的是，尽管医疗保健(和工人补偿)的成本在上升，但私人和联邦政府在工业卫生和劳动力保护方面的投资都在下降。在缺乏(和黯淡的前景)新的资金来确保工人健康的情况下，我们的领域必须努力在资源日益减少的情况下变得更加有效。因此，有必要提高工作场所危险监测的效率、及时性和成本效益。该项目将开发和协同创新技术，以满足这一需求。该项目旨在推进气溶胶暴露测量的最新技术。我们的领域太长时间以来依赖于过时、低效和昂贵的范例，这往往导致危险监测不足。我们的首要假设是，空气采样/分析的高成本是我们保护工人健康能力的限制因素。这些成本(确切地说是数百美元的计量)妨碍了日常的工业卫生工作，限制了监管的执行，并扼杀了可信流行病学的发展；后者反过来阻碍了我们制定新的暴露指南(和干预措施)以保护工人健康的能力。因此，这项工作的目标是开发个人空气采样和分析技术(泵、采样器和现场化学分析)，使工作场所的空气监测变得更具成本效益、及时性和代表性。这项研究将开发一种技术，将工作场所空气监测的成本降低一个数量级以上，并将从采样到危险信息交流的时间从几周减少到几个小时。因此，该项目有可能打破长期以来的低效和昂贵的危险监测模式。通过实现更高效、低成本的监测，这些技术将使职业健康研究人员能够在更大范围内调查危害(并预防疾病)，几乎涉及Nora的每个部门。在发展中国家，这项技术可以在许多发展中(和非常不安全的)工业部门重振工业卫生。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Airborne chemical and biological hazards contribute substantially to our nation's occupational disease burden. And yet, the resources needed to monitor workforce exposure to these hazards are scarce. Ironically, while the cost of healthcare (and worker's compensation) is on the rise, both private and federal investment in industrial hygiene and workforce protection is on the decline. In the absence of (and bleak outlook for) renewed funding to ensure worker health, our field must strive to become dramatically more effective in light of diminishing resources. Therefore, a need exists to improve the efficiency, timeliness, and cost-effectiveness of workplace hazard surveillance. This project will develop and synergize innovative technologies to address that need. This project aims to advance the state-of-the-art in aerosol exposure measurement. Our field has relied for too long on an outdated, inefficient, and expensive paradigm that often leads to inadequate hazard surveillance. Our overarching hypothesis is that the high cost of air sampling/analysis is a limiting factor in our ability to protect worker health. These costs (literally hundreds of dollarsper measurement) preclude day-to-day industrial hygiene efforts, they limit regulatory enforcement, and they stifle the development of credible epidemiology; the latter, in turn, hinders our ability o develop new exposure guidelines (and interventions) that protect worker health. The objective of this work, therefore, is to develop personal air sampling and analysis technologies (pump, sampler, and in-field chemical assays) so that workplace air monitoring can become more cost-effective, timely, and representative. This research will develop technology that reduces the cost of workplace air monitoring by over an order of magnitude and the time from sampling to hazard communication from weeks to hours. As a result, this project has the potential to break a long-held paradigm of inefficient and expensive hazard surveillance. By enabling more efficient, low-cost monitoring, these technologies will allow occupational health researchers to survey hazards (and prevent disease) on a wider scale and across virtually every NORA sector. In the developing world, this technology could empower a rebirth of industrial hygiene in many developing (and very unsafe) industrial sectors.