Culture hazards

Inspections The quality of inspections made, as reflected by their thoroughness and the actions taken with respect to findings, is another immediate and outward evidence of an organization s safety culture. Hazards and risks may be overlooked when inspections are made because that is what is expected, and actions may not be taken on hazards identified in the inspection process. If that occurs, employees determine precisely that, no matter what management says or writes, management does not intend to have a safe operation. Those unidentified or unattended hazards appear regularly in incident investigation reports. 

Management must modify the culture and develop human factors awareness in the hazard identification teams so that they will be capable of identifying the potential for human error. A good practice is to involve operators in the hazard identification team. 

Viral vaccines present problems of safety testing far more complex than those experienced with bacterial vaccines. With killed viral vaccines the potential hazards are those due to incomplete virus inactivation and the consequent presence of residual live virus in the preparation. The tests used to detect such live virus consist of the inoculation of susceptible tissue cultures and of susceptible animals. The cultures are examined for cytopathic effects and the animals for symptoms of disease and histological evidence of infection at autopsy. This test is of particular importance in inactivated poliomyelitis vaccine, the vaccine being injected intraspinally into monkeys. At autopsy, sections of brain and spinal cord are examined microscopically for the histological lesions indicative of proliferating poliovirus. 

Measures used to parameterise, or to limit, these component elements may vary between different t es of hazard and risk, between different components of the overall environment, or between different economic and cultural systems but the underpinning logic of the approach remains a transparent and potent taxonomy. 

Rooted aquatic plants, such as wild rice (Zizania aquatica), can accumulate up to 67 mg Pb/kg dry weight when cultured in tanks contaminated with high concentrations of powdered lead (equivalent to 7400 kg Pb/ha) however, this level is not considered hazardous to waterfowl feeding on wild rice (Behan et al. 1979). Lead content in plants collected from heavily hunted areas near refuges did not differ from those collected in the protected areas (Behan et al. 1979), which suggests that lead bioavailability to rooted aquatics is substantially lower from shot than from powdered lead. 

The risk asses sment may include an evaluation of what the risks mean in practice to those effected. This will depend heavily on how the risk is perceived. Risk perception involves peoples beliefs, attitudes, judgements and feelings, as well as the wider social or cultural values that people adopt towards hazards and their benefits. The way in which people perceive risk is vital in the process of assessing and managing risk. Risk perception will be a major determinant in whether a risk is deemed to be acceptable and whether the risk management measures imposed are seen to resolve the problem. 

The scope of activities of occupational toxicologists may be quite different from one organization to another, depending on its specific mission, resources available and corporate culture. In general, their activities can be divided into four broad areas data development, data evaluation and dissemination, hazard assessment, and employee training. 

But the landscapes we produce, cultural or otherwise, are not simply ideas, representations, or even exchanges of capital. Rather, they have concrete material characteristics and effects. In the case of lawn people, what is notable about the material nature of this aesthetic is that it is perceived as physically bad for water quality (and dogs, and children, as we shall see) by the people who maintain it. This raises questions about hazards and the accepting of risk. 

But as we shall see, many of us do take risky actions with a vague trust (driven by somewhat apolitical thinking) that companies and service providers would not knowingly put them at risk. Even assuming so critical a configuration of culture and economy as explored above, where lawn culture may be perpetuated to serve narrow economic interests, it is indeed hard to imagine a system in which an economy would inflict actual hazards upon the consumers and environments upon whom it depends for survival. 

First, the modem lawn cannot be an expression of culture outside of a political and economic history in which property, citizenship, and proper consumer behavior are conjoined. Second, lawns (although not necessarily grasses) must at some level require the inputs invested in them by people, and these demands must enforce human practices and behaviors. Third, chemicals for lawns must also represent real problems, ones bom of a risk society where hazards and... 

Thus, the American Lawn is a political and economic (and not solely cultural) object that by its design (and not by any form of ecological accident) demands inputs. Many of these inputs are hazardous, and knowledge of these hazards is easily available to lawn people. 

For biological hazards that include bacterial, viral or mammalian cultures, follow stringent precautionary measure as per the lab safety standards. 

---