Actions to reduce risk can range from using sensors for better construction fleet management to holding periodic training sessions about emerging issues.

It seems like aircraft incidents have become more frequent, whether it’s a crash or disappearance. This should catch the attention of aircraft facilities and manufacturers.

Driving during a national holiday is always a risk. Stay safe out there!

Researchers at the National Safety Council and the University of Michigan found that about one in 20 adolescents ages 10 to 17 and one in 10 young adults ages 18 to 25 report prescription opioid misuse, based on a new review published in Preventive Medicine. However, effective intervention programs are not in place to address prescription opioid misuse among young people, and NSC and University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center researchers are urgently calling for evidence-based prevention programs to be developed and tested.

In rodeo, it’s not really a matter of if you’ll get injured, but when and how badly. Last year, a major shoulder injury that tore six of the eight tendons in his riding arm took one rider out of competition for several months. Every rider who competes in professional rodeos carries a catalog of their injuries.

The American Red Cross and the American Cancer Society have partnered to launch a Give Blood to Give Time campaign to raise awareness on how blood donations help patients fighting cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation, used to treat cancer, can damage the body's ability to generate healthy blood cells and cause potentially life-threatening conditions. Blood transfusions from generous donors help to provide patients with critical clotting factors, proteins and antibodies needed to help their bodies fight back.

The CDC yesterday confirmed another infection with 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in the United States in California. The patient is among a group of people under a federal quarantine order because of their recent return to the U.S. on a State Department-chartered flight that arrived on February 7, 2020. All people who have been in Hubei Province in the past 14 days are considered at high risk of having been exposed to COVID-19 and subject to a temporary 14-day quarantine.

The EPA has proposed “regulatory determinations” for two chemicals whose presence in drinking water has raised alarm among the public and health experts. The agency is proposing to regulate two contaminants perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) – but not six others: 1,1-dichloroethane, acetochlor, methyl bromide, metolachlor, nitrobenzene, and RDX.

The respiratory disease caused by a novel (new) coronavirus that was first detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China has now been detected in 32 locations internationally, including cases United States. The virus has been named “SARS-CoV-2” and the disease it causes has been named “coronavirus disease 2019” (abbreviated “COVID-19”).

In a move toward meeting goals for better cardiovascular health in the United States over the next decade, the American Heart Association (AHA) is joining the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Hypertension Control Roundtable (NHCR)® along with other founding members in a public, private and non-profit collaboration committed to increasing blood pressure control rates to 80% by 2025.

Two studies demonstrate that older adults may be able to live longer, healthier lives by increasing physical activity that doesn’t have to be strenuous to be effective, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology and Prevention | Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health Scientific Sessions 2020. The EPI Scientific Sessions, March 3-6 in Phoenix, is a premier global exchange of the latest advances in population-based cardiovascular science for researchers and clinicians.

Warehouse hazards are often the cause of workplace accidents. Choosing the correct type of storage will greatly reduce the potential hazard in a facility. The correct storage medium will reduce improper lifting, reaching and travel distance to retrieve an item.

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition recommends drinking up to 3 liters of fluid a day. Water is vital for all cell function. It helps your brain to produce hormones and neurotransmitters, supports the lubrication of joints, keeps your skin cool through sweating or respiration, and your body to excrete waste.

Did you know that our body does not discriminate between sources of stress? It simply responds to the stress. So, whether the stress is coming from an actual event, or simply a thought, the body may react in a similar way. Now, in these times when there is so much uncertainty, stress can have a huge impact on our bodies.

Changes in safety and health approaches are needed both in and outside of government. Many established beliefs and assumptions concerning government operations currently are being re-evaluated and questioned. This reset presents an opportunity.

Expectations drive both the leader and follower. Various forms of research suggest that when leaders have higher types of expectations for their followers, those followers often live up to the expectations.

With more experience traveling the real world seeing safety programs in action (or inaction) I realized that words matter. They not only communicate, but they can shape the very approach you take to your safety programming. They can get you stuck or they can liberate your safety culture.

The term “Safety culture” has become like the term “engagement” in popular management writings. There is no common agreement on the term. We are left with (mis)interpretations of terms like “safety culture,” which lead to haphazard attempts at changing organizations toward improvement.

Behavior is not right or wrong, good or bad. It just is. It is neutral. Approach behaviors with the dispassionate, objective view of a scientist. Not with emotions.

It wasn’t until recently that we started understanding that people with different personalities tend to naturally pay more attention to safety attributes like work environment, people, equipment, processes, etc. based on their personality tendencies.

Not many people walk around throughout their day with a risk assessment in hand. We should, however, always have an informal risk assessment tool in our mind that allows us to perform at least a cursory assessment until we can dig deeper or in a more formal way.

The knowledge gap within utilities, construction, and related industries is more of a growing concern than ever — especially when it comes to serious injuries and exposures. 

The union steward had just recounted an incident where a supervisor asked one of his workers to step into standing water to work on corroded gauges near the coker. The work needed to be done immediately as it would delay ongoing maintenance on the fractionator to take on different stock feed.

In the last decade or so many organizations have been placing more of a focus on Serious Injury and Fatality prevention (SIF). The theory behind the traditional “Safety Pyramid” (or Heinrich Safety Triangle) says if we reduce incidents at the “base” of the pyramid, it follows we will reduce incidents at the top of the pyramid at an approximately proportional rate. 

If there’s one thing the global business community has learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that continues to ebb, flow and unfold on the daily, wreaking having on bottom lines in every corner of the world in its wake, it’s the outright imperative for companies to be agile “from top to bottom.”

Evans Roofing Company, Inc., with its subsidiaries Charles F. Evans (union) and CFE, Inc. (non-union), is a building envelope contractor licensed in 46 states. Charles F. Evans and CFE, Inc. are the only commercial roofing and wall panel contractors to hold the VPP STAR mobile work force designation.

For all the COVID-19 safety guidelines circulating, some hundreds of pages long, basic best practices are straightforward and known by most Americans. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, recently recounted them in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Women have made amazing strides in many fields and industries throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Unfortunately, there are many others in which it remains a big challenge for a woman to rise to the top — or even, in some cases, to enter the industry at all.

HEMCO Emergency Showers are fully assembled and ready for installation to water supply and waste systems. This unit is equipped with a pull rod activated shower and push handle eye/face wash for quick rinsing of eyes, face and body. 

Se-Kure Domes and Mirrors is a true Made in America manufacturer of mirrored safety products. Full 360-degree domes from 18” to 60” in diameter, 180 & 90-degree domes are also available.

With more than 500 exhibitors showing their products and services at the ASSE Professional Development Conference & Exposition, it’s not a bad idea to plan your itinerary in advance, so you won’t miss something you really want to see.

The CarbonX Team will display and discuss the latest innovations in non-flammable protective apparel at booth #1431 at ASSE’s SAFETY 2014, June 8–10, in Orlando.

Workers in many fields – construction, landscaping, oil and gas extraction, emergency response, firefighters among others – toil in high heat stress conditions. These tasks can lead to rapid increases in body temperature that raise the risk of heat-related illnesses.

VelocityEHS, the global leader in cloud-based environment, health, safety (EHS) and sustainability solutions, announced today it has acquired Spiramid, developer of the most advanced and easy-to-use system for managing industrial hygiene (IH). The acquisition adds Spiramid’s occupational safety & health software and unparalleled IH expertise to the most trusted EHS platform in the industry.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane… no, it’s a Squishy Robot, dropped from a helicopter or a drone to transmit crucial environmental data to emergency responders at disaster scenes.

Excessive noise is prevalent across industries. From manufacturing to construction, agriculture to oil and gas, more than 22 million U.S. workers are exposed to hazardous noise each year.1 Wherever unsafe levels of noise exist, employers are responsible for providing hearing protection devices (HPDs).

Allergan plc, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, is a global pharmaceutical company. ISHN asked David Eherts, PhD, CIH, Vice President Global EHS, based in Madison, NJ, to explain how the company is implementing the “New View” of safety.

ISHN recently exchanged an email Q&A with Amanda Alexander, global product manager for Emerson’s Location Awareness System.

When loud noises cannot be reduced or eliminated through engineering controls, workers who are exposed to them must use hearing protection devices (HPDs) to conserve their hearing. This notion is not new, nor is the concept that HPDs require fit-testing to be effective.

eCompliance unveils its newest advancement in their product line-up at NXT 2019: The Future of EHS, their annual conference. The concept version of the eC Edge App was announced to attendees today to give customers and prospects a first-hand look at the advanced functionality the product will begin to offer in 2020.

Tainted love: Johnson & Johnson recalled 33,000 bottles of baby powder after the Food and Drug Administration found asbestos in one container, The New York Times reports. The company, which once marketed its baby, body, and wellness products as being “for all you love,” has long denied that its talc-based products ever contained cancer-causing asbestos, but it faces more than 15,000 lawsuits from customers who say their products caused them to develop ovarian cancer or mesothelioma, a rare cancer linked to asbestos.

Traditionally, safety departments get opinions and guesses thrown at them, says Stinson. There may be a hazard. Equipment doesn’t seem to be working. “Now you have objective data all mapped out. It’s very important that this is objective data, so you know for a fact that a part of plant is leaking. It’s a fact, not a suspicion,” he says.

Back in 2015 I had a widow-maker heart attack. That near-death event focused attention on my heart health, particularly when I push to physical extremes during mountain backpacking. 

On a Tuesday afternoon, you send a maintenance contractor out to a remote station to perform a routine check on some of your equipment. Your contractor drives out to the nearest access road, parks his truck, and walks over to the site. When he gets there, his personal gas monitor alerts him to high levels of dangerous gases...

Working alone and working at heights for me began years ago as an instrument technician in a large steel mill in western Pennsylvania. We always tried to work in pairs but there were occasions when I had to work alone or apart from my buddy.

We have gradually come to depend on cell phones and their apps for more and more information about our daily lives. The latest trend seems to be health monitoring that allows the average person to keep an eye on their vital stats. The future of hand protection is moving in much the same direction.

Many devices, including gas detectors, have connectivity features designed to transfer information from a lone worker back to safety personnel on site. Although connectivity features are a tremendous step forward, not all lone worker solutions deliver the protection they need.

KPA, a leading software, consulting services, and training provider for Environment, Health & Safety (EHS) and Workforce Compliance solutions, announced today the upcoming release of the Vera SuiteTM software platform for managing EHS, workforce compliance, online training, and regulatory management in a single integrated cloud system.

Area monitoring is frequently used as a temporary solution to help keep workers safe in industrial facilities where mid-term deployment occurs as well as for confined space entry and far-working locations such as oil and gas platforms.

Modern day portable gas detectors are quite reliable and accurate. For enhanced worker safety and to be fully compliant there is a little known concept called bump testing. Bump tests are crucial when it comes to protecting your workers from hazardous gases and other air-borne toxins.