In this module, we're going to talk about hazards that we find in the workplace now, did you know that workers are healthier than the general population? You may not have known that, but it is true however, when you think about all the hazards that people are exposed to in a workplace, for example, a construction site, maybe one of the worst types of sites in terms of health and safety hazards, you might wonder, how can workers possibly be more healthy than the general population. Workers have a much broader range of the kinds of exposures that they have in the workplace than we generally see in the community and very importantly, workers tend to have much, much higher levels of exposure and much higher doses as a result, because typically it's the workers who are creating the exposure in the first place and then that exposure potential travels out into the community where people are exposed at a lower intensity. So, the workplace really is where we tend to see the very worst types of exposures for biological, chemical and physical hazards I'd like to spend the next few minutes just running over some of the types of hazards that workers commonly encounter. So biological hazards are absolutely a feature very common in some workplaces in particular, for example, health care settings so you might not think of tuberculosis or the flu as an occupational hazard, but if you work in a hospital, it absolutely is, you might not think of malaria or west Nile virus as an occupational hazard. But if you're a construction worker who spends most of your life working outdoors, mosquito bites and infections are absolutely a biological risk that you face, workers also exposed to a number of chemical hazards in the workplace and these come in a variety of different types. They may breathe in gases or vapors that could lead to cancer or lung disease or central nervous system effects even these construction workers are working with paints and solvents that could cause health effects. We also have issues around dust that workers might inhale so these workers having torn down an old building could have been exposed to asbestos they're working in dirt's, they might have exposure to things like silica. Workers can ingest chemicals on the job imagine these workers working with a lead contaminated building and not having a place to wash their hands when they go to eat lunch there, touching lead and getting it onto their food and then into their mouth and workers can also have dermal contact and potentially absorption of chemicals that could result in irritation or burns or other outcomes. Workers also very much are exposed to physical hazards again, thinking about these construction workers, they have exposure to noise, like you can hear workers operating things like jackhammers have vibration exposure, they can work in very hot or very cold temperatures those are both environmental stressors. They very much have ergonomic hazards there bent over there lifting heavy objects, they have repeated motions that can all harm their body and of course they have safety hazards there is the risk of getting run over by heavy equipment on the site, the risk of having an electrical shock from touching an energized circuit so lots of different physical hazards in construction and other types of work. We can even get fairly exotic about this this is a graph of the number of workers who have died over a number of years as a result of being bitten by spiders or other types of arachnids or mites so there are lots of things in the workplace, including spiders unfortunately, my very worst fear. We can think about hazards from a number of different perspectives, one of them is how often are these observed by people who go out and look at workplaces for living? For example, inspectors with the occupational safety and Health Administration or OSHA, what we're looking at here is the top 10 list of violations in 2016 you can see the name of the regulation that is violated and the numbers are actually the part of the federal code that the inspector sites and says this is the law you broke. So if you scan quickly through this list, many of these Issues are going to be present on a construction site like this in fact, 8 of the top 10 hazards identified by OSHA in 2016 where safety hazards, only two of the top 10 hazards were chemicals. And so workers here face a lot of acute risks on the job they're much more concerned about addressing things that could kill a worker today than they are about a chemical hazard that might not give a worker cancer for several decades so this is an issue where we know more about safety hazards than we do about other, more chronic environmental and occupational hazards. Another way we can examine hazards in the workplace is not the hazard directly, but the outcome associated with it for example, this graph here, we're looking at the rate of fatal injuries by different kinds of outcomes deaths due to things like electrocutions or falls or motor vehicle accidents. What you can see here is that for most of these different types listed in the graph, the trends are going down over time so we're having a lower rate of deaths, particularly from motor vehicle accidents the top line, but also from things like falls and shocks unfortunately, as you can see with the dashed red line where we haven't made improvements, is workplace homicides which have been relatively stable over time. So looking at trends like this, actually also give us an opportunity to evaluate the impacts of policies another way we can look at hazards is by seeing how they might be associated with job and industry so it turns out the type of job you do an industry you work in absolutely dictates the types of hazards are exposed to the degree of your exposure and the magnitude of risk. So here we're looking at the rate of fatal injuries by the type of industry a person was working in the top most line here you'll see is the mining industry and as with the previous graph, you'll see we have a pretty strong decline over time, that's improvements, fewer people are dying in mining. Unfortunately again, looking over my shoulder, you can see the line for the construction industry has been relatively flat over time so again, we've made improvements in some places, but not everywhere. For the next few slides, I'm going to show you some pictures and ask you to put on your hazard identification hazard for each of these slides I'd ask you to pause the picture before I start talking and identify as many hazards as you can that this worker is exposed to. Now, when we take a look at this photo, a couple of things become immediately evident, one this person is certainly exposed to potential burns from that liquid metal, which is incredibly hot, they also have the potential for heat stress and potentially heat stroke. The workers got a long metal rod that they used to tamp the metal down, that's a very heavy rod in there, bent over, so we have ergonomic risk factors, there could be noise associated with the machinery that creates and moves this molten metal. The worker is also potentially breathing in fumes and vapors and particulate matter that are created in the process of melting that metal, what time of day is it? We don't know this could be the middle of the night or the middle of the day this may be a shift worker and we know that shift workers is tied, for example, to things like certain types of cancer. Looking at the 2nd image, these are workers in a coal mine well, let me ask, what is that yellow piece of equipment operate on? What type of fuel does it have? If it's electric, that's okay but if it's diesel or gas, they're breathing in combustion products, carbon monoxide, other materials that could be toxic What sort of environment are they in? How stable is that roof that tunnel could collapse and potentially kill them? They have noise exposure from chipping away at the rock to get at the coal underneath, potential vibration exposures, ergonomic exposures, it could be very warm in that environment and again, what time of day is it? They may be working in the middle of the night and quite exhausted so many, many different hazards that we could identify and just a handful of types of jobs here. Finally, I want to tie this together by noting that not all workers are created equal there are some types of workers who are especially vulnerable and that we want to take extra steps to protect one of them is women. Women have historically been less of a focus for occupational health because they were simply assumed to have safer jobs but if you think about a pregnant women on the job, exposing herself and her unborn fetus now that we know better and we're studying that were actually realizing they're just as dangerous as more traditionally focused jobs. Another group were especially concerned about is Children, Child labor is typically very poorly regulated around the world and even here in the United States, in certain occupations like agriculture, child labor is absolutely permitted, but places Children at a great risk of injury or fatality. Older workers are also at increased risk we know that they are much more likely to die from a fatal injury on the job than younger workers, and they require different accommodations than a younger worker might to make the same jobs safe. Finally, we always have to be cognizant about socially and economically disadvantaged workers, undocumented workers are a great example. Without papers, they're forced to take whatever job they can get, and oftentimes that involves the most dangerous, lowest paying job, so we have to worry about all workers but again, these special working populations deserve additional time and resources.
