Slips, trips, and falls (STF) represent a serious hazard to workers and occupants in many industries, homes, and communities. Often, the cause of a STF incident is multifactorial, encompassing human, environmental, and task risk factors. A STF-related disability can greatly diminish the occupational capability and quality of life of individuals in both the workplace and the home. Countering STF...

Officials from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) recommended that hospitals and other healthcare employers adopt measures, including the use of needleless and safe-needle devices, to prevent injuries and illnesses from accidental needlesticks in the workplace. “Today’s healthcare workforce faces a multitude of risks,” said NIOSH Director Linda Rosenstock, MD, MPH....

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to update rate files for the NIOSH Life Table Analysis System for Personal Computers (PC LTAS) reflecting the newly adopted tenth revision changes to the International Classification of Diseases. METHODS PC LTAS allows researchers to conduct comparative mortality and morbidity analyses for the purpose of identifying disease-exposure associations using...

Silica, or silicon dioxide (SiO2), is a group IV metal oxide, which naturally occurs in both crystalline and amorphous forms (i.e. polymorphic; NTP, 2005). The various forms of crystalline silica are: α-quartz, β-quartz, α-tridymite, β-tridymite, α-cristobalite, β-cristobalite, keatite, coesite, stishovite, and moganite (NIOSH, 2002). The most abundant form of silica is α-quartz, and the term q...

Buchberger and Kandri−Rody and Kapur defined a strong Gröbner basis for a polynomial ideal over a Euclidean domain in a way that gives rise to canonical reductions. This retains what is perhaps the most important property of Gröbner bases over fields. A difficulty is that these can be substantially harder to compute than their field counterparts. We extend their results for computing these base...

In 1970, the OSH Act was promulgated with the intent focus “to assure so far as possible every working man and woman in the Nation safe and healthful working conditions” (29 U.S. Code 671). The question of how to accomplish that goal has been the subject of discussions throughout the SH&E community long before the act was passed. Over the years, practitioners and researchers have suggested that...

The standard method for determining diesel particulate matter (DPM) exposures in underground metal/nonmetal mines provides the average exposure concentration for an entire working shift, and it can take weeks to obtain results. This approach is problematic because, although it reports that an overexposure has occurred, it fails to provide critical information about cause or prevention. Converse...

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has a partnership relationship with the asphalt paving and roofing industries and their associated unions. Our partners saw in the EHP Focus article “Paving Paradise: The Peril of Impervious Surfaces” (Frazer 2005) the statement on page A459: “Asphalt is one concern, as it contains coal tar pitch, a recognized human carcinogen .....

We find a class of five-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell type Lagrangians which contains the bosonic Lagrangians of vector multiplets as a subclass, and preserves some features of supersymmetry, namely the existence of multi-centered black hole solutions and of attractor equations. Solutions can be expressed in terms of harmonic functions through a set of algebraic equations. The geometry underlyin...