Medical center exposed workers to asbestos, other health hazards: OSHA

All employers must keep their workers safe, OSHA says.

Aleda E. Lutz Veterans Administration Medical Center employees in Saginaw were exposed to asbestos, bloodborne pathogens and unsafe operation of powered industrial vehicles, a U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspection found.

OSHA issued six notices of unsafe or unhealthful working conditions following the March 2014 inspection initiated as part of OSHA's Federal Agency Local Emphasis Program*.

"The Veterans Administration Medical Center failed to ensure that the facility was a safe and healthy workplace because it did not provide appropriate personal protective equipment or train employees how to keep themselves safe," said Larry M. Johnson, director of OSHA's Lansing Area Office.

"All employers, including federal employers, are responsible for knowing the hazards in their facilities. They must follow standards to protect worker safety and health."

OSHA's inspection found that officials failed to remove a broken, powered industrial vehicle from service, resulting in one repeat violation. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' facility in Battle Creek was cited for the same safety violation in 2013.

To issue notices for repeat violations, OSHA must issue at least one other notice for the same violation, within the same standard industrial classification code, at another agency establishment. Thousands of workers are injured every year, sometimes fatally, while operating powered industrial vehicles.

In addition, OSHA found five serious violations for failure to ensure employees wore masks and eye protection whenever they could expect exposure to splashes, spray, spatter or droplets of blood or other infectious material, and to ensure that work surfaces were properly decontaminated.

Facility officials did not ensure that powered industrial truck operators completed training successfully or that employees who performed housekeeping duties were provided asbestos awareness training. Additionally, the facility used a power strip that exceeded acceptable voltage levels.

A serious notice is issued when there is substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result from a hazard about which the employer knew or should have known.

As required by the Occupational Safety and Health Act, federal agencies must comply with the same safety standards as private sector employers.

The federal agency equivalent to a private sector citation is the notice of unsafe and unhealthful working conditions. A notice is used to inform establishment officials of violations of OSHA standards, alternate standards and 29 Code of Federal Regulations citable program elements.

OSHA cannot propose monetary penalties against another federal agency for failure to comply with OSHA standards.

The medical center has 15 business days from receipt of its notices to comply, request an informal conference with OSHA's area director, or appeal the notices by submitting a summary of the agency's position on the unresolved issues to OSHA's regional administrator.


Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, employers are responsible for providing safe and healthful workplaces for their employees. OSHA's role is to ensure these conditions for America's working men and women by setting and enforcing standards, and providing training, education and assistance. For more information, visit http://www.osha.gov.

Source: OSHA

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Researchers develop new early warning system for toxins

Turkeys inspire smartphone-capable sensor for airborne chemicals

Turkey skin can shift color.
Photo courtesy of Tom Curtis/
FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Some may think of turkeys as good for just lunch meat and holiday meals. But bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley, saw inspiration in the big birds for a new type of biosensor that changes color when exposed to chemical vapors.

This feature makes the sensors valuable detectors of toxins or airborne pathogens.

Turkey skin, it turns out, can shift from red to blue to white, thanks to bundles of collagen that are interspersed with a dense array of blood vessels. It is this color-shifting characteristic that gives turkeys the name "seven-faced birds" in Korean and Japanese.

The researchers say that spacing between the collagen fibers changes when the blood vessels swell or contract, depending upon whether the bird is excited or angry.

The amount of swelling changes the way light waves are scattered and, in turn, alters the colors we see on the bird's head.

Seung-Wuk Lee, UC Berkeley associate professor of bioengineering, led a research team in mimicking this color-changing ability to create biosensors that can detect volatile chemicals.

"In our lab, we study how light is generated and changes in nature, and then we use what we learn to engineer novel devices," said Lee, who is also a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The researchers created a mobile app, called the iColour Analyser, to show that a smartphone photo of the sensor's color bands could be used to help identify toxins of interest. They described their experiments in a study to be published Tuesday, Jan. 21, in the journal Nature Communications.

Sensors that give off color readings are easier to use and read than conventional biosensors.

However, the major ones in development elsewhere can only detect a limited range of chemicals and, according to the researchers, they can be very difficult to manufacture.

"Our system is convenient, and it is cheap to make," said Lee. "We also showed that this technology can be adapted so that smartphones can help analyze the color fingerprint of the target chemical. In the future, we could potentially use this same technology to create a breath test to detect cancer and other diseases."
         
In copying this turkey-skin design, Lee and his team employed a technique they pioneered to mimic nanostructures like collagen fibers. The researchers found a way to get M13 bacteriophages, benign viruses with a shape that closely resembles collagen fibers, to self-assemble into patterns that could be easily fine-tuned.

The researchers found that, like collagen fibers, these phage-bundled nanostructures expanded and contracted, resulting in color changes. The exact mechanism behind the shrinking or expanding phage bundles is still unclear, but it's possible that the small amount of water in the phage is reacting to the chemical vapors, the researchers said.

The turkey-inspired biosensors were exposed to a range of volatile organic compounds, including hexane, isopropyl alcohol and methanol, as well as vapor of the explosive chemical TNT, at concentrations of 300 parts per billion. The researchers found that the viruses swelled rapidly, resulting in specific color patterns that served as "fingerprints" to distinguish the different chemicals tested.

The researchers showed that the biosensor's specificity to a target chemical could be increased by genetically engineering the DNA in the M13 bacteriophage to bind with sites specific to TNT.

The biosensor was then exposed to two additional chemicals, DNT and MNT, which have similar molecular structures to TNT. The engineered biosensor successfully distinguished TNT from the other chemicals with distinct color bands.

The biosensors were also able to signal changes in relative humidity, ranging from 20 percent to 90 percent, becoming redder with moister air and bluer with drier air.

The study lead author is Jin-Woo Oh, a former postdoctoral researcher in Lee's lab and now an assistant professor in the Department of Nanomaterial Engineering at Pusan National University in South Korea.

The National Science Foundation, the Defense Acquisition Program Administration and Agency for Defense Development in South Korea, Korea's Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, and Samsung helped support this work.

Source: University of California, Berkeley via EurekAlert! 

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Hundreds of lab accidents involve dangerous toxins

Workplace accidents in laboratories can be a public health risk.

In many laboratories, a workplace spilling accident can mean the release of harmful viruses or toxins into the environment.

In the United States, labs need special approval from the government to handle these toxins, which can pose a severe threat to humans, animals or plant health, and they need to have the appropriate equipment to handle them.

Despite these restrictions, there were 395 “potential release events” of “select agents” in U.S. labs between 2003 and 2009 reported to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), according to a Scientific American blog.

Those workplace accidents involved loss of containment, spills, accidental needle sticks or sharps injuries, but many are not officially reported, the writer says.

While the U.S. plans to build a new Medical Countermeasures Test and Evaluation facility, the full range of potential exposures for the scientists and residents in the area need to be considered first, experts warn.

Source: Scientific American blog

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