Project Details:

Exposure Assessment using the Logbook Method

Two major problems are met when measuring workers' long-term average exposure at the workplace.

1. Exposure distributions are often approximately lognormal and very wide.

2. Exposures are measured in the air breathed by the workers, but action to reduce exposure frequently comprises alteration of the process performed or of their environments. No quantitative data are available for priority settings. Measurements are most often performed only on a single day or a few days, which causes a certain risk of biased results from non-representative days. Such a bias has been shown to be highly significant. Using the logbook method both the time component and the concentration component of exposure are measured. The advantages obtained using this method are that both short-term and long-term doses can be calculated and the structure of exposure is presented. The focus is shifted from workers' exposures to the dose delivered from the process, which may have changed. Further, data from abnormal days can be identified and discarded. Effects and costs of different improvements to the working environments can be calculated. The method is also applicable to human exposures in the ambient environment and may be used in the third world. Considering exposure to VOC's, expensive measurement of exposures may be substituted by calculation of by mathematical exposure models.

The project is in good progress, but the text needs to be illustrated with real examples of application.

In Dec 2002, a draft has been completed and submittedfor publication in Pure Appl. Chem.

project abandoned