Project Details:

Best practise for workplace exposure assessment: a critical review of methodology

A multidisciplinary group will describe and recommend best practice for workplace exposure assessment as an IUPAC Technical Report and related PowerPoint presentations, to be the property of IUPAC and available on the IUPAC website. Target groups are analytical chemists, toxicologists, epidemiologists, industrial hygienists, and educators.

Assessment of exposure of workers to hazardous chemicals ideally requires a team, involving an analytical chemist, an occupational hygienist, a toxicologist, and a statistician. However, the task of exposure assessment often falls to one person with expertise in only one of these disciplines and the resultant assessment is poor. For this project an appropriate multidisciplinary group, with many years of experience, has been assembled.

Exposure assessment is based on knowledge of pollutant sources and pathways to target organ(s) in people exposed. This requires knowledge of the physico-chemical properties of gases, vapours and aerosols. Exposure assessment at the workplace requires knowledge of only certain parts of physical chemistry, and these will be covered in this project.

Identification of the measurement object and measurand in an investigation is the most important, often neglected, aspect of exposure assessment . Sampling strategy is a significant error source, which can only be controlled by the people doing the sampling, yet very little attention is usually paid to describing and justifying the sampling strategy chosen. Measuring, i.e. sampling and analysis, including pre-analytical operations, calibration for systematic errors and matrix effects ought to be a small source of error, provided there is quality control. The WG members have over many years been deeply involved in development of sampling strategy and quality control work and have therefore experience, which many people could benefit from if collected in one single source as in the planned Technical Report and PowerPoint presentation collection.

The educational materials will be submitted to CCE for comment, revised appropriately, and the final version submitted for their approval.

project abondoned