Hidden injury

See, for example, R Sennett and J. Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York Norton, 1993). 

Proper planning is a delicate process because public health measures are rarely noticed or appreciated (like buried utility pipes, they are often hidden functions) except when they fail—then they are very visible. Consumers are particularly upset by unsafe (contaminated) environmental media (water, air, and/or soil) because they are often viewed as entitlements—and indeed, it is reasonable for consumers to expect a high-quality, safe environment. Public health failures during response to contamination threats often take the form of too much or too little action. The results of too little action, including no response at all, can have disastrous consequences potentially resulting in public injuries or fatalities. On the other hand, a disproportionate response... 

Study of Hidden Air Pollution Injury to Tobacco Plants, Plant Physiol. (1964) 39, Lviii. 

Vaccination with copolymer-1 (Cop-1 Copaxone leva Pharmaceutical Industries, Petah Tikva, Israel) protects retinal ganglion cells from death due to mechanical injury to their axons, or injury to the perikarya by glutamate or increased intraocular pressure (Kipnis et al., 2002). Cop-1 appears to act as an antigen that cross-reacts with, and activates, a wide range of self-reacting T cells (Hafler, 2002 Kipnis and Schwartz, 2002). This can boost the T-cell effect and achieve autoimmunity comparable to that evoked by T cells that are specific to hidden epitopes from antigens at the site of stress (Kipnis and Schwartz, 2002). 

Accidents not being reported Injuries hidden Unrealistic Injury rates... 

The safety pioneers whom 1 have quoted in this book need to be thanked for their diligent research into one of safety s hidden secrets and for exposing what could be a key to injury reduction at the workplace—the safety culture, which is the heart of the problem. 

Accidents such as the one described above were the most typical risk to railway industry employees, but often these accidents remained hidden from the public gaze as they were rarely reported by the media. The media gaze tended to be reserved for major train accidents, most especially those affecting the travelling public. Employee injuries were usually only reported by the media when multiple deaths were involved or in the event of a train accident. 

Managers are now coming to realize that the actual cost of a lost workday injury is underestimated. The problem is that we only see what is on the surface and do not always understand the hidden cost. For example, let s look at the indirect and hidden costs of one lost workday incident ... 

Heinrich s direct costs of injuries and illnesses are compensation and liability claims, medical and hospital cost, insurance premiums, and cost of lost time except when actually paid by the employer without reimbursement. His list of factors of hidden accident cost includes 11 subjects, some of which have subparts. Only the major captions appear here some have been combined (p. 39,3rd ed. p. 51,4th ed.). ITiey cover the following costs ... 

In the third and fourth editions of his book, Heinrich gives data on nine cases that are to support his ratio. This author has not found any other data that authenticates his research. Also, Heinrich wrote that The examples of hidden cost given in this chapter include no fatalities, major dismemberments, or major permanent injuries, nor do they... 

Minor injuries, property damage, and near miss incidents constitute the hidden part of the iceberg and are the parts of the undesired events that can wreak havoc with a business systan. Safety efforts cannot be successful if they are focused on the tip of the iceberg, the serious injury. Safety, if viewed as the control of total accidental losses, must focus on the base of the iceberg. The base of the iceberg represents the accidents that a company has not yet had. These include near miss incidents, or warnings that consequences could follow, under slightly different circumstances. Remember, luck determines the outcome and end result of an undesired event. 

Even today in the United States there are about 13 deaths daily in the workplace and 4 million injuries per year (Barab, 2012), which means we have to better integrate system safety into all engineering aspects. Studies conducted at Stanford University estimate the cost of accidents for nsers of conunercial and industrial construction at 1.6 billion annually. Hidden costs were found to be two to 18 times higher. Researchers also found that construction safety research over a 10-year period showed irrefutable... 

Minor human errors and equipment failures that are hidden behind serious accidents are called incidents. Previous works such as (Heinrich 1980) revealed the relation between serious accidents and incidents. Heinrich showed from the statistical records of occupational accidents in US that behind one case of accident, 29 cases of medium-scale accidents with injuries and 300 cases of minor events without any losses occur, which are often called near misses. 

In the case specific case of blackouts, widespread economic and non-economic losses on a large scale are not well-understood. This is compounded by the fact that private and public companies do not account for the hidden costs incurred as a result of the loss of reliability in their systems that might generate both other non-economic losses, such as premature human death and human injury, and indirect economic and social impacts (Castillo, 2014). Also, there is a concern about the possibility... 

A study carried out by the Health and Safety Executive into the costs of accidents showed that for the construction site under review, the direct costs were a small proportion of the total and produced a directrindirect ratio of 1 11. This ratio is commonly illustrated as an iceberg , because of the invisible hidden costs below the waterline. On the site studied over a period of 18 weeks, 120 people were working, and in that time there were 56 minor first-aid injuries and no lost-time injuries. But there were also 3570 noninjury accidents. The results for major, minor and noninjury accidents are often reproduced in the form of an accident triangle . 

---