Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory of Australia was a fairly wild place in the 1950’s with a number of uranium mines and a lot of people who only wanted to be known by their first names. The legend is that the workers from the mine would sometimes demonstrate how […]
Yearly Archives: 2008
My first encounter with methanol
Methanol toxicity
A policeman stands outside the NYSE and the newspaper cation reads "ready for anything...". The policeman's respirator is only held by one strap, making any protection very low. The other strap is dangling.
Ready for anything…
It seems that products from Asia containing asbestos are creeping into our supermarkets. These posts are from the UKOH listserver.
Asbestos Alert
The American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) publishes advice for professional Hygienists to assist them in applying their art to the workplace, particularly with the publication of Threshold Limit Values (TLVs(r)) and the supporting documentation. However, in the absence of better advice, this information is very influential internationally in […]
AGGIH court challenge for silica, copper nPB, DPM TLVs
Formaldehyde is one again coming under the spotlight, with converted shipping containers in the Northern Territory that were used for offices being found contaminated by formaldehyde and a call from CFMEU union for bans on its use. They claim
Formaldehyde – lessons learned
It was 1973 and I was finishing off my undergraduate degree. A change from electrical engineering to physics had meant I had one subject to go and I took a job at the nearby Chrysler car factory
Industrial dermatitis
Another holiday job gave me insights into heat stress. I was in high school and my holiday job was helping an electrician install fire alarms in a new school. My job was to get into
Installing insulation
Have you noticed that newsreaders refer to both hypethermia and hypothermia as hypathermia? It is quite rare for them to annunciate the words properly. It doesn’t matter if its someone fished out of the ocean or collapsing in a marathon. Its seen as the same condition! One of my pet […]
Hypathermia
Dangerous orphaned radiation sources continue to be a problem, highlighted by the Goiânia accident