Production environment: risk factors

Pesticides were massively used, especially in the first decades after WWII, thus becoming one of the largest risk factors to human life and health, as well as to the entire natural environment. In 1962, Rachel Carson [2] described the terrible consequences of using pesticides in a way that the general public could understand for the first time. She also showed the most important difference between pesticides and other pollutants pesticides are not production waste, but are introduced into the environment deliberately. For the first time, the well-founded hypothesis was stated that, with time, poisonous and foreign chemical substances could make the Earth uninhabitable. 

Because of the first of these uncertainties (the extrapolation across species), assessments of risks to human health apply an uncertainty or safety factor of 100 to the experimentally derived no observed adverse effect concentration (NOAEC), in other words the NOAEC is divided by 100 to derive a no-effect level for human toxicity. This factor has been used since 1961, when it was chosen on an essentially arbitrary basis (RCEP, 2003, p22). In the assessment of risks to the environment, application factors of 10, 50, 100 or 1000 are applied to the results of tests carried out on specific species,2 depending on the species used and whether the tests were long term or short term. Evidence to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) for their report Chemicals in products indicated that these are merely extrapolation factors — they express the statistical variability of test results but do not effectively take into account inter-species variability, the vulnerability of threatened species, lifetime exposures or the complexity of biological systems... 

Prior to considering the factory layout the designer must understand the risks to the production environment. These come from factors external to the plant, transmission media into the plant and internal factors resulting from operations within the plant. Table 8.1 details some examples of risk factors. Measures must be designed into the factory to eliminate or control all the risks to acceptable levels. 

Table 8.1 Examples of risk factors in the production environment...

The development of control strategies to reduce E. coli 0157 H7 will require the identification of biological, environmental, and/or management factors that affect its incidence in cattle and their production environments. Research investigations and epidemiological studies have identified a number of risk factors or management practices that can or may contribute to the occurrence of this pathogen, and that may be exploitable to reduce its numbers, persistence, and transmission in cattle. 

The security operation of natural gas purification plant relates to the factory and the safety of operators, for there exists flammable, explosive gas in it. Once incidents come out, it will cause casualties and economic loss (CAI YAO 2008, PENG et al 2009, SHAO et al 2007). Because of the complex production environment of natural gas purification plant, factors causing the risk in the plant are various, most of which are fuzzy. Therefore, adopting the fuzzy comprehensive evduation model can analyze the possibilities and consequences of all kinds of risks. Using fuzzy language can express the possibilities and consequences of the risks in the plant, and determine the sort of the risk area, so as to guide the safe production (HUANG J1 ANG 2007). 

Table 2.1 shows how various combinations of risk factors distribute risk across different populations and turn our attention to different aspects of the problem. As Table 2.1 suggests, analysts can represent the potential threat to humans (as deaths, lost limbs, broken fingers, and torn ligaments). Or they can shift the focus of attention to calculate the probable effect upon institutions (production, profit, and investment) or environments (roof falls, explosions, and fires). By shifting the focus of attention from human to non-human factors, unscrupulous risk analysts can reduce the magnitude of risk mathematically without actually changing the number of deaths or injuries in the social world. When analysts focus on non-human elements, improved health and safety is not a necessary outcome of a mathematically reduced risk." ... 

The individual risk for drag inefficacy or drug toxicity is a product of the interaction of genes and the environment. Environmental variables include nutritional factors, concommittantly administered drugs, disease and many other factors in-... 

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