Duke Occupational & Environmental Medicine

On-Site and High-Lighted Documents

Our new onsite counter should register every single ‘hit’, without delay. 
Since 12/12/96, this is the number of visitors to this top page:
 

Comprehensive answer to the recent discussion regarding the use of Mercury in the felt-hat industry.

Dr. Leonard Goldwater wrote a retrospective toxicological reference book , Mercury; a History of Quicksilver  Published by York Press (ISBN: 0912752017 ). 

After seeing several informal replies posted to the OEM-L, we had these paged re-typed from the book (now out-of-print) for others to see the depth of Dr. Goldwater’s incredible detective search on this topic.
 

CDC Recommendations (Request for Comment) on M. Tb

Controls in clinics, clinical laboratories and research settings are discussed in detail.

The physician’s role in helping patients return to work after an illness or injury

DOT’s declaration that the new Arizona and California marijuana Propositions have NO effect on drug testing policy.

This volume represents the proceedings from an EPA & National Academy of Sciences conference in 1992. The entire book is available, with many illustrations and hundreds of pages of type. The volume covers several topics and perspectives, and even includes many articles from the Clinical Ecology movement’s heroes. The link from here is all I can do… it’s much too large for me to copy into the Duke servers.

available as Web-available text only here at Duke. The PDF file (with exact formatting) is available at the CDC‘s own site.

California’s Ergonomic Standard has been passed. Here‘s its final version. 

It’s actually very short, and is available both as text and as reg-looking Acrobat. Here‘s the original citation.

NIOSH has declared a high priority attack on silicosis. 

The frst of these resources are available on our web-site or at the actual NIOSH display site. 

The EPA’s Agenda for Protecting Children’s Health from Environmental Threats

This includes a 70K document, including an executive summary and a letter from Carol Browner, the EPA Administrator. Though not for scientific consumption (many references to the achievements of the Clinton Administration), it does state several policy efforts which will have clinical and environmental regulatory impact in the near future.

NIOSH has declared a high priority attack on silicosis. 

The frst of these resources are available on our web-site or at the actual NIOSH display site.

Occupational & Environmental Medicine Residency Listing

Apparently, AOEC & ACOEM jointly created a list of OEM programs. The word processing file was shared with me in early October, 1996, and I transferred it into hypertext. I admit that the links to the site are mostly to the Institution rather than to the specific program, but should still be useful..

Though maintaining the detailed information on each site is too demanding for me, I’m willing to modify the hypertext links to the program’s home page. 

Notify me at Gary N. Greenberg, MD, MPH. 

The OEM-L community as topic to study.

Amazing: A more-or-less formal analysis of the use of the Occ-Env-Med-List (focussing on Australians)

available for review either as Microsoft Word document, or as Envoy-readable graphical display. It was produced by Dr Beata Byok as a graduate student, and was sent to us by Dr Dino Pisaniello , Senior Lecturer in Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, University of Adelaide South Australia.

Envoy documents are just like the Adobe Acrobat files, in that they represent non-editable, fully graphical files where the preparation software is commercial (WordPerfect, Quattro and Presentations) and the reading software is free, and can be configured to automatically boot from your browser when the appropriate file is downloaded from the internet (here, the key is the filename ends with *.EVY).

Labor Day Checklist: 
American College of Occupational & Environmental Medicine’s "Protect Your Health and Safety at Work"

Copied from the soon-to-be-announced ACOEM web site, this is a timely press release regarding steps regular citizens can take to protect themselves from Occupational and Environmental dangers. 

Proposed "Miscellaneous" Changes to General Industry and Construction OSHA Standards

"Reinvention" of several OSHA Standards
Announced in late July ’96, this is a potpourri of updates to many OSHA rules. The document is available at OSHA‘s page, but isn’t indexed or combined there. Our copy is referenced below. The topic areas affected are VERY scattered, governing:

Explosives and Blasting Agents	Storage and Handling of Liquefied Petroleum Gases
Storage and Handling of Anhydrous Ammonia	Sanitation
Temporary Labor Camps	Safety Color Code of Marking Physical Hazards
Medical Services and First Aid	Fire Brigades
Helicopters	Pulp, Paper, Paperboard Mills
Textiles	Sawmills
Agriculture Operations	Telecommunications
Vinyl Chloride	Inorganic Arsenic
Coke Oven Emmisions

OSHA Recordkeeping Presentation

Given 6/25/96 at the 35th Annual Professional Development ASSE Conference and Exposition, this informal checklist and outline clearly declares differences from current programs and the proposed new standard . Even the new ‘OSHA-300’ and ‘OSHA-301’ forms are presented. This informal outline can be seen within our own area, or direct at the OSHA site. 

OSHA Special Emphasis Program on Silicosis

This memorandum provides inspection targeting guidance for implementing an OSHA-wide Special Emphasis Program (SEP) to reduce and eliminate the workplace incidence of silicosis from exposure to crystalline silica. 

This is available here as simple text at Duke in our gopher, where you’ll get all the words but no graphics. For the document as offered by OSHA, including the occasional graphic and perfectly formatted tables, link to the document at their site. 

National Occupational Research Agenda Page

Read the new NIOSH research agenda, commemorating the 50 year anniversary of OSHA/NIOSH. The agency really put together a very spiffy web-resource, with dozens of graphics, diagrams and photos. This means that any attempt to place it in the gopher (as text only) would be pathetic. Instead, jump here.  

OSHA Guidelines for the Prevention of Work Place Violence at Night Retail Establishments

UPDATED!
This draft is newly revised (6/28, updated from draft 4/96). The changes were not described in the new announcement.  

Summary Information Regarding BSE & Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease in British Beef

The best single link is to the British Medical Journal, where the governmental notices as well as good scientific discussions are displayed.

The other option is the text only resources that I’ve collected from non-UK sources as well. These include the USDA and WHO, and they are posted in our gopher at this depth in the menus.  

The Virginia Supreme Court Denies Link from Work to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

The Virginia Supreme Court evaluted the relationship between Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and work (in pretty severe industrial settings, not just keyboard use) and found that this illness is NOT work related. Here’s a quick summary of the case’s facts and findings.  

The Institute of Medicine’s Newest Summation of TCDD / Agent Orange Effects on Viet Nam Vets

The IOM has created a very sophisticated hypertext web-site, with categorical findings on the potential health-links to this exposure. It is surprising to find that the list of probably attributable illnesses has not only lengthened, but that it now includes birth defects following paternal exposure. Spina bifida, which is not usually considered a genetic disease, was found to be eleveated in several studies.  

The OSHA Proposed Occupational Injury and Illness Reporting Requirements

Available as 

Text (looks like the gopher, but reliable width) or 

Acrobat pages. These are a beautifully accurate recreation of the actual Federal Register pages. 

This version requires use of the Adobe Acrobat software, in order to see the complex tables and typesetting (available free from the developers or from the CDC). This program should be downloaded and installed before clicking to receive the document. There are also a couple of steps that you will need to take to make your web-browser learn that files received with the filename suffix *.PDF should be fed to Adobe Acrobat to be read.  

OSHA’s Proposed Text on Tuberculosis Preventive Controls.

The straight text is available (in our gopher) and the spiffy formatted one (web-readable without Acrobat) can be obtained from a direct link to where OSHA has posted this. 

Human Radiation Experiments Committee Report.

Copied from the DOE, the Executive Summary of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments’ Final Report is now available here. The site of the official release is also provided .

The Baltimore MCS Conference

Speakers’ comments were released directly to our web page. The pre-manuscript abstracts from the Multiple Chemical Sensitivities Conference held in October, 1995 are available.

A discussion of Multiple Chemical Sensitivities

This resource is already on the Web, at the Central Texas Poison Center. I copied to our domain, too.

I am also providing a link to a promotional site for a book with advice for patients who suffer this situation. In my own view, this book is based on some pretty marginal clinical principals. This link is not an endorsement (by either Duke or AOEC), but is an opportunity for the "other side" to make a case. 

OSHA Estimate of Effects of Potential Reforms

OSHA’s analysts prepared a complex document of the likely consequences of the potential legislative changes to OSHA, the workplace and safety issues. It includes many graphical elements, and can not be distributed by any other means than the WWW. You can leap to OSHA’s site, or see it here.  

Health Based Exposure Limits, 9th edition

Apparently posted here for the first time in its electronic form, a controversial refutation of the TLV’s (Threshold Limit Values) is now available. Released directly to our web page, the complete text of the pamphlet Chemical Exposure Guidelines, 9th Ed. is available. 

If you have any questions regarding this page or Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Duke,
please contact Gary N. Greenberg, MD, MPH. 

Sponsors:

The Occ-Env-Med-L Mail-list and these resources originated and are distributed from Duke University Medical Center. As Division Chief and faculty member, Dr. Greenberg is allowed to run this cyber-outreach without interference, and the five servers where these aggregate materials are housed (office-mail, home-mail, web-pages, gopher-text, mail-list) are each part of the University’s global infrastructure, provided without direct or proportionate user fees. 

The Computers in Occupational Medicine Section of the American College of Occupational & Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) has very kindly picked up some of the recent costs, based on their earnings from their annual tome, which lists the top specialized software packages available to the Occupational Health Professional. Neither they nor the ACOEM as a whole have ANY involvement nor any resulting responsibility for the information displayed in the maillist or on the web-pages. 

For several years, the Duke Occup/Environ Medicine Division has received generous annual support for its professional outreach efforts from the Mobil Foundation. This support does not imply any blame for the material presented here. The Foundation not only has no role in the management of these resources, they don’t seem to have anybody who even subscribes to the OEM-L, either from Mobil Inc or from the Mobil Foundation! We are very appreciative for their support and for the freedom that this provides.

The Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics is supported by ATSDR (the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry) and NIOSH (the National Institute of Occupational Safety & Health).  NIOSH has provided support for web-release of certain pages and materials.

The AOEC won a 1995-1996 grant to support this page and the maillist at Duke from the Telecommunications and Infrastructure Assistance Program, NTIA, (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) U.S. Department of Commerce:  

"to allow health care providers to tap into the expertise of specialists in the field of occupational and environmental medicine." 

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Revised: 11/1/96 

Please, at least once, read our Disclaimer: for the assignment of blame. 

The background is modified from a great online collection