NIOSH conducted this HHE to investigate complaints from underground coal miners of illnesses, including respirato ry problems, asthma, and skin irritation, after exposure to rock glues in the course of their work duties. NIOSH was requested to provide guidance in establishing a com­ pany medical surveillance program for those workers with exposure to rock glue adhesives containing isocyanates. ...

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in early 1974 began industrial hygiene studies of vinyl chloride exposed workers. Three VC monomer plants, three VC polymerization plants, and seven PVC fabrication plants were surveyed. V polymerization plant workers and workers in one job category in VC monomer plants were exposed to average levels above 1 ppm. The highest aver...

Occupational regulations are developed to conserve the hearing of a worker noise-exposed for 8 h per day. Workers often work longer shifts. In order to account for longer exposures, regulators have adopted variations of the equal energy hypothesis in which the ear is modeled as an integrator of acoustic energy over time. Thus time and energy can be traded to produce equal hearing loss. This res...

The aims of the present work were: to calculate lifting energy consumption (LEC) in work activities designed to have a growing lifting index (LI) by means of revised NIOSH lifting equation; to evaluate the relationship between LEC and forces at the L5-S1 joint. The kinematic and kinetic data of 20 workers were recorded during the execution of lifting tasks in three conditions. We computed kinet...