Laboratories of all types use fume hoods as a means of protecting their employees from chemical exposure and the processes and experiments that are performed. A fume hood is generally considered the most important engineering control in any laboratory environment to provide protection from the inhalation of harmful chemicals as well as from fires and explosions.
In May, I had written about the proposed changes to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) Sewer Use Regulations (360 CMR 10.000) that were published in April 2019. The revised regulation has now been published and is available on the MWRA TRAC website.
So labor day weekend is over…But September is here – and it brings fall weather, football, apple picking, corn mazes and our favorite, another safety tip recap! Check out the summaries below and click on the titles to read our August blogs!
Have you ever wondered where the recommendation to leave the area for 30 minutes before cleaning up a BL2 level spill comes from? The 30 minute timeline for re-entering following a BL2 spill is a standard recommendation to prevent aerosol exposure.
The allowance by the Mass DEP and EPA for working container use under certain conditions in laboratories was intended to give labs more flexibility with waste management and to facilitate compliance. However, compliant working container management can be a challenge.
August is National Immunization Awareness Month (NIAM), an annual event sponsored by the CDC to highlight the importance of immunizations. What better time to review your company’s Hepatitis B vaccination program to ensure that it’s fully compliant!
The third annual OSHA Safe + Sound Week is being held August 12-18, 2019. This national event is intended to promote the value of workplace health and safety programs. Employers are encouraged to hold events and activities that highlight the elements of their health and safety program during this week.
Did you know that violations related to the OSHA Hazard Communication standard ranked #2 in the OSHA top 10 list for most frequently cited violations in 2018? Common citations included not having a written program or safety data sheets (SDS) for all chemicals, lack of employee training, and deficiencies related to secondary container labels.
OSHA has been involved with a long-term project to be aligned with the Globally Harmonized System (GHS) of classifying chemical hazards and providing labels and safety data sheets for hazardous chemicals.
The use of fresh blood drawn from company employees is sometimes required when timelines in experiments are too tight to use an outside blood supply vendor. That said, it is considered to be preferable from a safety standpoint, and often a logistical one as well, that an outside blood supply vendor be used rather than establishing an in-house program.
Many of Safety Partners’ clients hold Controlled Substances Registrations (Researcher) for the research use of controlled substances. In Massachusetts, a controlled substance includes all drugs regulated by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in schedules I through V as well as Schedule VI, which is defined as all prescription drugs, which are not included in any other schedule.
Local recombinant DNA ordinances, including those of Boston, Cambridge, and Lexington to name a few, require compliance with the NIH Guidelines for Recombinant DNA Molecules (originally published in1986) as well as revisions and amendments to the Guidelines.
