Fatal Facts

A real life example (OSHA Fatal Facts No. 5)... 

Get a copy of the OSHA Fatal Fact No. 5, and share it along with your company procedures and equipment for mechanical lockout/ tagout. 

Chlorine is a respiratory irritant. The gas irritates the mucus membranes and the liquid burns the skin. As little as 3.5 ppm can be detected as an odor, and 1000 ppm is likely to be fatal after a few deep breaths. In fact, chlorine was used as a war gas in 1915. 

Nuclear accidents, while being tlie most frightening, liave not occurred often. In fact, tlicre have only been a luuidful of fatal incidents since an understanding of nuclear energy and radiation has been developed. However... 

Which difference could account for the fact that a diver is much less likely to suffer from the bends if he breathes a mixture of 80% helium and 20% oxygen than if he breathes air (The bends is a painful, sometimes fatal, disease caused by the formation of gas bubbles in the veins and consequent interruption of blood flow. The bubbles form from gas dissolved in the blood at high pressure.)... 

Paramethoxyamphetamine (PMA) has a hallucinogenic potency about five times that of mescaline and three times that of MDA. Because of its high toxicity, it caused fatal intoxications shortly after it became available on the street in the early 1970s (Cimbura 1974). Some of the fatalities were apparently due to the fact that the substance was sold to users as MDA because of the higher potency of PMA, severe intoxication (i.e., hypertensive crisis, seizures, death) occurred. 

These process safety management systems help ensure that facilities are designed, constructed, operated, and maintained with appropriate controls in place to prevent serious accidents. However, despite these precautions, buildings close to hazardous process plants have presented serious risks to the people who work in them. This observation is prompted by the fact that some buildings, because of their design and construction, have collapsed when subjected to comparatively moderate accidental explosions, with serious injury or fatality to the occupants. Conversely, experience indicates that personnel located outdoors and away from such buildings, if subjected to the same blast, may have a lower likelihood of serious injury or fatality. 

By the end of the war, poison gases filled one in four artillery shells used by both sides. In military terms, however, poison gas failed. Since masks provided quite effective protection, poison gas was never a decisive weapon on the Western Front the fatality rate for firearms was ten times higher. Poison gas was not used in the next world war. In fact, if World War I had continued, chemical warfare would have backfired on the Germans. Prevailing winds blow eastward, and Germany had run out of mask material and had no fabric to reclothe soldiers blistered by corrosive gases. 

Meanwhile, these chemicals—like chemical agents encountered at work or in hobbies or as pollutants in air, water, soil, or food—can also cause harm. Sometimes the known mechanisms of action permit us to predict the nature of toxicity to be expected. A meta-analysis of prospective studies from U.S. hospitals indicates that 6.7% of in-patients have serious adverse drug reactions 0.3% have fatal reactions (Lazarou et al., 1998). In fact, estimates of 40,000 to 100,000 deaths per year attributed to errors in medical care, primarily due to adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals, make this phenomenon a major cause of death in the United States (Meyer, 2000). A tremendous... 

In retrospect, I was stunned by my failure to act appropriately in the moment. Bart of the reason was because I had lost sight of the fact that chemical reactions can be fatal, and because Carolyn s reaction was, for the most part, invisible. I also did not understand how dependent she was on her attendants in these kinds of situations. However, another major factor was that I d been exposed to the smell of fragrances, dryer sheets and cleaning products that morning in the bed and breakfast where I was staying. My exposure had been brief and I thought I was recovered, but in fact my thinking and reactions were still considerably dulled. This was a wake-up call. 

Finally be aware of the fact that diseases in the upper part of the gastrointestinal tract are common in the elderly and can cause severe complications and even be fatal. Drugs that are often used in the elderly due to chronic diseases with inflammation and pain are often the cause of gastritis, peptic ulcers and hiatus hernia. The risks of medication side effects as a reason for the problem must be taken into account when treating elderly for peptic ulcers and stomach pain. 

We suspect that the magnitude of most of the associations noted between meat or coffee and specific fatal diseases are somewhat underestimated because Adventists may tend to underreport the amount of meat or coffee they use. If a substantial number of subjects actually use more meat and coffee than they reported on the Initial questionnaire, it would tend to make it harder to find the real associations, and the observed associations would tend to be weaker. Furthermore, we may have missed associations because subjects changed their habits during the 21-year follow-up period. All observed associations are based on meat and coffee use at the time subjects completed the baseline questionnaire (1960). Subsequent changes in these habits would tend to reduce or eliminate the possibility of finding disease associations with these habits. Failure to find associations, or detection of weak associations, could also result from the fact that our study population contains relatively few subjects who are very heavy users of meat or coffee, while it contains an abundance of subjects who have no exposure to these items. 

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