Number: 2001-077-2-700
Title: Best practise for workplace exposure assessment: a
critical review of methodology
Task Group
Chairman: Jytte
Molin Christensen,
Members: John
H Duffus, Erik Olsen,
Stephen Rappaport,
and Zhifang Chai
Completion Date: 2004 - project abandoned
Objective:
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.
Description:
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.
Progress: project abondoned
Last Update: 22 December 2003
