Exposure Assessment Must Stop Being Local

Abstract

Exposure assessment activities today are hampered by a narrow focus that is detrimental to preventive occupational health goals. Exposure data useful for disease prevention are not adequately collected, and exposure surveillance tools do not receive adequate attention. Professional recommendations to improve this state of affairs have been in existence since the early 1990s, but have not been widely adopted. Although the Government Performance and Results Act could help address these shortcomings--by enhancing exposure surveillance activities in the OSHA and NIOSH Strategic Plans--the agencies have not taken advantage of this opportunity. Their strategic plans rely largely on accident data to measure performance, despite the fact that occupational disease has a much larger toll. This article makes recommendations to address these shortcomings by increasing the role of exposure surveillance tools in the agency strategic plans.

The Advanced REACH Tool (ART): Incorporation of an Exposure Measurement Database

“…Exposure measurements may be taken for several different purposes and their associated data storage systems can have widely different structures and content. The majority of occupational exposure measurements are collected for immediate compliance or insurance objectives and may be unrepresentative for routine activities (Gómez, 2000;Money, 2001;Rushton and Betts, 2001). The contextual information that describes the circumstances under which these measurements were made is often very limited and therefore these data are generally only useful within the narrow scope in which they were obtained.…”