Asbestos In Home

Asbestos still kills around 5000 workers each year, this is more than the number of people killed on the road.

When materials that contain asbestos are disturbed or damaged, fibres are released into the air. When these fibres are inhaled they can cause serious diseases.

These diseases will not affect you immediately; they often take a long time to develop, but once diagnosed, it is often too late to do anything. This is why it is important that you protect yourself 

now.

OSH In School

In this post, i will not be writing about what specific hazards are present at school and how to eliminate them but rather i will explain how to put in place an OSH management system that could be use to manage and control the risk at school. The reason is each school or any workplace has different type of hazards and need different way of controlling the hazards. To apply the same hazard to all school is not effective. To have a effective OSH mangement system to the right way to go.

1. Safety and Health Policy. Everything start from the fundamental. A policy will outline the core responsibility of the school management and their commitment to osh, to ensuring the safety and health of all occupants at the school, to provide resource to management safety and health and etc. The policy shall be sign off by the chairman of the school management.

2. Safety and Health Committee: The committee is responsible to carry out all the safety and health activities at the school. It should be consist of a Chairman (board of school director), a secretary (safety and health officer, if appointed or safety representative), min 4 representative from management (board of director, principle or vice principle) and min 4 representative form teachers, parent, student representative or support / ancillary staffs. The elected committee members are based on total number of school teacher and students exceeding 100 persons. The member will meet to discuss and plan out the activities to ensure safety and health.

3. Safety and Health Resource: Beside financial budget, other resource include school layout plan, building plan, osh organizational chart, evacuation route, emergency assembly point, safety signage, personal protective equipment (PPE), training and promotion for osh.

4. Safety and Health Rules and Responsibility: Rules on safety and health should be established, published and communicated to the staff, parent and student. Appoint person responsible for osh activity or contact person like fire warden, first aider and security officer.

5. Risk Assessment / HIRARC: Risk assessment or safety inspection on school compound shall be carried out to identify potential hazards, evaluate the risk and control measure to reduce the risk. Please refer the hazard identification, risk assessment, risk control (HIRARC) guideline publish by DOSH is a good reference on how to carry out risk assessment. Training should be provided to the safety and health committee to supply them the knowledge and skill to carried out the inspection.

6. Emergency Facilities: Fire fighting facilities (fire extinguisher, fire hose, sand bucket), first aid facilities (first aid box, school clinic), chemical spillage clean up kit (if laboratory is present), evacuation route and emergency response team should be provided.

Hope that this post will give you an insight on setting of OSH in school. Thank you for reading.
   

Tianjin Explosion

At first glance of the picture posted on the internet, its looks like something out of a science fiction story. The destruction is massive. After that, the first thing that come to my mind: chemical storage safety.

The accident location is at a chemical storage depot where imported chemicals are temporary stored before they are transported or distributed through the region. From the scale of the explosion and destroyed vehicle, one can expect the massive volume of chemicals stored. Death toll reach 112 with 90 still missing as of this posting today. With 700 reported injuries, damage of property, disruption of operation, law suit from the victim's family....the story will never end.

At Malaysia, under OSHA Control of Industrial Major Accident Hazards (CIMAH) Regulation 1994 enforce the requirement for such storage facilities. CIMAH regulation enforce the registration of competent person, demonstration of safe operation, emergency plan, threshold quantity of stored substance etc. Even in the case if your facilities or factory does not store above the threshold quantity, proper safe storage practice should be implemented. Chemicals compatibility and storage ventilation are two areas that should be look into. Flammable and oxidizer chemical should not be stored together because their fumes can react with each other to cause fire or explosion. Storage should be separate using barrier or distance between each other. The ventilation should be adequate to remove contaminated air from accumulating in the storage area. A wall or ceiling exhaust ventilation should be installed in place.

One Small Step for Safety

Just conducted another OSHA course last week for my Diploma in plantation management students. I been doing this OSHA course for while and every session is unique by itself. I decided to post about the recent session because it caught my attention on the origin place of the participant. The OSHA course duration is 2 days and cover all the basic in OSH legislative and risk prevention. 

                                    

On the second day of the course, three participants come to me and ask: "Sir, can we finished the course at 3pm" (instead of the scheduled 5pm). I ask "what is the reason" curious to find out why. One reply "because have to catch the express boat, last one leaving at 3.30pm". A few of the participants are coming from rural district, which is accessible by river only. They basically took a 2 hours boat ride to Sibu town to attend the course and go back afterward. Most of them has never heard of OSHA and their right as worker under the law. 

Most of the male participants are plantation field conductor handling spraying, manuring and collection work. My greatest hope is after the course, they would have gain the knowledge and awareness to safe guard their own safety at their workplace. From there let them be example to other to follow. A small step in growing safety culture.      

Expending Safety Culture

Speaking on the topic of safety culture, among the first thing that come to mind is safety health committee, employee safety minded, safety campaign etc. Most of us will think about our own organization first because we are responsible for our own workplace safety.

When a contractor come to our facility, we will highlight to the contractor about our safety, health and security rules, and that is the extend of our safety culture to the contractor. How many of us will actually audit the contractor or supplier's safety management level. In the end, we will award the project to the most price competitive contractor.

Imaging a situation for a project procurement, one of the major criteria for contractor selection is the contractor safety grade. Only grade A and B will be considered. Now this will surely put a charge on all contractor or those with low grade to improve their safety level. To make it more thorough, to achieve grade A, the contractor's supplier must be of the same grade. So one drive the other to improve their safety culture. Take example of our Halal industry, one of the important criteria for halal certification is the raw material must be Halal certified. Same thing apply here, no grade A, no business. Now, we are talking money $$...more business opportunity if the company has good safety grade or certification. No employer will mention again "its costly to invest in safety" because it will cost more to lose business opportunity.

Hierarchy Of Control

The phase Hierarchy of control should come familiar with safety practitioner. There may be additional steps in the pyramid but for certain the top will be 'Elimination' and the bottom is 'Personal Protective Equipment or PPE'. Theoretically the best control is elimination of the hazard and the least prefer is providing worker with PPE because this does not eliminate the hazard, it just prevent the hazard from doing more serious harm to the victim.

In real life, it may not always be the case, For example, To eliminate a hazardous process mean you may need to redesign your process flow, create additional less hazardous process even re-arrange your shop floor to create a new flow. This cost involve will be huge. To substitute a hazardous material or chemicals will be require less cost than elimination, eventually you can get something which is cheaper then your existing chemicals in term of material cost or waste treatment cost. But this will require time and effort to research and develop the new replacement chemicals. The employer must be prepare to commit man hours for this to be successful.

So what do you do when your employer is among those 'making profit only' type. Instead of starting from the top of the hierarchy, we have to start from the bottom, that's PPE. Make make sure no fatality or serious injuries will occur. At the same time, start administrative control using method like standard operation procedure, safety precaution sign, limited access area, training and educate the worker, inspection checklist etc. This will create safety awareness in your workplace. So when the awareness catch up, your employer in the process will also learn to respect the safety element. Now you move to the next step, propose low cost engineering control to your employer like install emergency stop bottom, guarding, safety interlock etc. Then you move to higher cost engineering control method like fume hood, automation, conveyor system etc. Very soon you will be in the Isolation control  already.

Safety and health culture does not come overnight. It has to be nurture and grow.

Fire hazard from the sky

A floating object made of paper, bamboo, lid candle or wax. Some call it sky lantern others 'Kun Ming Den' is gaining popularity among the local during mid autumn festival. The lantern is release to the sky carrying wish or prayer from the owner. 

Sky lantern is banned in the US as it pose a fire hazard, as the flight of the lantern is uncontrollable, it basically follow where the wind take it. On air, it pose a risk to flying aircraft. When the lantern landed on the ground, it not just a source of ignition. 

1. lantern landed on the airport runway can mislead the pilot as a landing beacon. 

2. lantern landed on the road may pose danger to motorcyclist

3. lantern landed on petrol station, fuel storage facility, tire storage, tire recycling plan, etc. can be catastrophic

In Malaysia, under section 285 of the Penal cose, those defying the ban can be jailed for six months or fined RM2,000 while under section 5 of the Exlosive Act 1957, those found letting off sky lantern could face jail term up to five years or fined RM10,000. Unfortunately, i still see lantern floating around airport area each year.  

Today come across this news from Sarawak Tribune titled: 'Owner loses RM5 million after factory destroyed by fire'. The news mentioned the fire start at 2.20pm. when the owner heard his worker shouting that the factory caught fire. The owner try to put out the fire using a fire extinguisher but to no avail. The fire spread to the rest of the premise.

                                                                             photo taken from Sarawak tribune.

Beside the owner with his fire extinguisher, where are the rest of the workers? Running for cover or there is only one fire extinguisher available at that time. The number of fire extinguisher and their location in the factory need to be plan and maintained properly. The worker has to be trained on how to correctly use a fire extinguisher. For a factory like this, it should has it own ERT, emergency response team especially a fire fighting team. The members selected from different section of the factory. It doesn't cost much to train your worker on fire fighting as compare to install smoke detector and fire sprinkler system.

It might cost the owner to spend 1-2K a year to maintain the system. A few hundred to train his worker. But running the factory for 13 years without incident = priceless. In this case = RM5 million.

Conclusion: IF YOU THING SAFETY IS EXPENSIVE TO MAINTAIN, TRY AN ACCIDENT.

HIRARC Risk Assessment

HIRARC, hazard identification, risk assessment, risk control. Its a common name well known in the safety and health field. What is risk? Risk = likelihood x severity. Likelihood is the chances that an accident would occur. Severity is how serious the effect of the accident to the victim. If both are high, the risk will be high. Below is the guideline from DOSH for risk matrix.

	Severity (S)
Likelihood (L)	1	2	3	4	5
5	5	10	15	20	25
4	4	8	12	16	20
3	3	6	9	12	15
2	2	4	6	8	10
1	1	2	3	4	5

The green zone is consider low risk, the yellow is medium and the red is high risk. If you risk assessment put the risk at high. You better stop the work or process until you find a way to control the risk.

LIKELIHOOD	Description	Rating
Most likely	The most likely results of the hazard / event being realized	5
Possible	Has a good chance of occurring and it not unusual	4
Conceivable	Might be occur at sometime in future	3
Remote	Has not known to occur after many years	2
Inconceivable	Is practically impossible and has never occurred	1
Severity	Description	Rating
Catastrophic	Numerous fatalities, irrecoverable property damage and productivity	5
Fatal	Approximately one single fatality major property damage if hazard is realized	4
Serious	Non-fatal injury, permanent disability	3
Minor	Disabling but not permanent injury	2
Negligible	Minor abrasions, bruises, cuts, first aid type injury	1

One of the common mistake that some people make when assessing the risk is they don't take into account the current control measures and go straight into assessing the risk as there is no control measure in place. The is not right.

For example: for a worker operating a boiler. The likelihood an accident would occur is put 3 or 4. The severity is put 4 or 5. Because we think the boiler is very dangerous and could explode and when it does, there will be fatalities. But when you look into the current control measures like almost all boiler has to be inspected every 15 months by DOSH inspector and service by authorized boiler serving company. Not to mention the monthly maintenance by the owner. All this has reduce the likelihood and severity to 1 or 2 as accident could be slip or fall at the boiler area.

Always take into account the existing control measure when doing your hirarc.

Cold Room Storage Safety

Cold room, freezer room or blast chiller are among the name given for this refrigeration storage space. It very common among the food industry for storage of frozen food or raw material which require lower then ambient temperature of storage condition. What offend being overlook for cold room is the safety hazard it present. To maintain the cold temperature, air flow from outside is restricted so the cold room is build air tight. The insulation is so good that it is almost sound proved. Which mean that if you get trap inside a cold room, you cry for help wouldn't be heard form inside and you will soon suffocate and pass out due to lack of oxygen or intoxicated by toxic fume trapped inside.

Among the safety control that are recommended for cold room are 1. anti freeze door nope should be install on the inside of the room, to enable the entrant person to open the door from within in case the door is accidentally close. 2. A tool to force open the door or create an opening on the wall. It can a crow bar or an axe in case the inner door nope fail. 3. A third option is to install a alarm outside the cold room with the panic bottom on the inside, the downside of this is if your cold room is not humidity control, it can get very moist and it will damage the circuit for the panic bottom causing it to fail. 4. Establish a buddy system, where two workers are working together with one entering the cold room while the other stay outside. The outside stand by person should only left when the 'buddy' exit the cold room. In some case, cold room could be treated like confine space entry.

How to become a Register Safety and Health Officer : Part II

With the certificate of attendance, you can apply to take the SHO examination organized by NIOSH. The exam consist of 4 papers namely Paper I, II, III & IV. Paper I consist of multiple choice question, subjective question and essay question. The objective and subjective question, you have to answer all the question but for essay question, you only need to answer 4 out of 6 questions. Paper II consist of the same format with the difference:
Paper I - Niosh sho module I & II
Paper II - Niosh sho module III & IV

Paper III on the other hand is quite challenging, its a work station test where candidate are required to go through 10 work station each with its own set of question. With 5 minutes given to answer the question for each station. Reading the question already take up 1 minutes, maybe 2 minutes to figure out the answer and 2 minutes to write down the answer. You might end up not answering all the question.

Paper IV is a workplace assignment where the candidate choice a workplace to write a risk assessment report and submit the report to Niosh exam unit. This is followed by a presentation of your assignment to the examiner and followed by an interview session.

The duration for the candidate to complete or pass all the examination is 2 years starting from when the first paper is taken. i.e. If you take Paper I in Oct 2013, by Oct 2015 you must pass all the paper or consider fail in the exam. The second condition that will cause you to fail is failling a single paper for 5 times. i.e. if you fail paper IV, you may resit the paper again the second time, third time...until fifth time. If you still fail paper IV the fifth time, you have to retake the exam.

If that happen, it doesn't mean you cannot take the sho exam ever again. You can by taking a SHO improvement course (10 days) then re-apply to take the sho exam all over again from paper I to IV.

                                ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ You only fail when you give up ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

How to become a Register Safety and Health Officer : Part I

I was taking a break from the blog to concentrate on my SHO exam. In Malaysia, the authority on safety and health is with the Department of Occupational Safety and Health, DOSH.

Under DOSH, the training and certification is done by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, NIOSH.

In Sarawak, there are college and university that collaborate with Niosh to offer Diploma in OSH. If you take those course you are exempt from taking the Niosh SHO course but you will have to sit for the Niosh SHO exams.

Step 1 - The Course

Niosh SHO certification programme

Module: 4 modules

Duration: 22 days (monday to saturday every week)

Location: Niosh center Kuching (near Pentanak Market), Bintulu & Miri

Cost : RM 4,000

Cannot take 1 month off !! another option is the module course, each module can be taking in one week for each month. Say, module 1 on the 1st week of Feb, module 2 on the 1st week of Mar, module 3 on 1st week of Apr and module 4 on May.

After you completed the whole course, you will be awarded with a Certificate of Attendance for Safety and Health Officer. The certificate qualify you to take the Niosh SHO exam with minimum academic qualification of SPM. The application for exam is conducted by Niosh Headquater in Bangi. You can request to take the exam in Kuching, Bintulu or Miri.      

Food Preservative

We will be taking about fish. We consume fish as part of our daily diet for its protein and vitamin. Fish accounted for 26% of our daily protein diet. But are you aware that beside the fish essential that we consume, we are also consuming other element together. One of them that come in mind is formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is a chemical compound commonly used for preservation of biological specimens. It kills most bacteria and fungi so to make it suitable to use for preservation of specimens. Formaldehyde is highly toxic to animal including human and it has been classify as a known carcinogen, what this mean is clinical studies has shown that it can cause cancer in human. A low dose will cause skin burn and irritation. Higher dose will cause dizziness and abdominal pain. Long term exposure to formaldehyde will cause nasal cancer.  

Formaldehyde has made its way into the fishing industry, where formaldehyde are being apply to fish product to prolong its shelf live. Last year, 103 tons of fish from Malaysia and Pakistan exported to Medan Indonesia were found to contain formaldehyde. The shipment was quarantine off and sent back to Malaysia. A layer of formaldehyde is spray on top of the fish skin to prevent bacteria growth which is the leading cause of food decay. Formaldehyde is colorless, so you wouldn't see it.  Indirectly it reduces the operation cost by depending less on refrigeration and less on special care during transportation. Fish product reach the hand of consumer fresher but with the additional preservative.

Advice to the Consumer

1.     Wash all food thoroughly with running tap water because formaldehyde can be soluble in water so washing can remove the present of formaldehyde.

      2. Soak dry groceries like dried fish thoroughly in clean water before cooking and discard the water. 
3. Cook all food with the temperature of 75°C or above because heat can breakdown the formaldehyde.
4. Buy from reliable sources. 

National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health

Last week i travel to the NIOSH headquarter at Bandar Baru Bangi, Selangor to take up competency examination for chemical health risk assessor. Bandar Baru Bangi is a new township at Hulu Langat district, Selangor. Its a 45 minutes drive from KLIA. The exam would take 2 days, the center provide hostel but i opt to stay at a motel nearby because of the facilities nearby.

There are 11 competency you can obtain from the Department Occupational Safety and health Malaysia, through taking the course, passing the exam, work assignment and interview.
1. Chemical health risk assessor
2. Hygiene technician I
3. Hygiene technician II
4. Occupational health doctor
5. CIMAH competent person
6.  Lift competent person
7. Noise competent person
8. Authorized gas tester
9. Entry supervisor
10. Indoor air quality assessor
11. Safety health officer

You can also opt to take the courses to enrich your knowledge only without taking the exam.

The first judgement

When ever i travel outstation whether to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore, i can't stop to admire the beauty and the development progress each country has made. But as a safety practitioner, i can't stop to take notice of the personnel protective equipment (namely safety helmet or hard hat) that is being worn by the construction worker.

It comes in yellow, red, blue, white etc color; At the glens of an eye, you can easily spot whether the construction site enforce the worker PPE requirement. Safety and progress development has to more hand in hand. Lack of safety awareness and high accident rate will tarnish the image of the country amid the construction of beautiful high rise building. Safety awareness represent a society intellectual level. Putting on a safety helmet means that the worker understand the risk involve and follow the rules to safe guard his safety, it show the employer understand his responsibility to provide PPE and safety control measure on the site. If a developer cannot even provide his worker the necessary tools to keep them safe, what will you expect from the standard of work project he offer. If a worker doesn't seem to care about following the rule of safety, what will you expect the quality of work he provide. Safety begin with you.

Salted Fish, chinese style

Favorite local delicacy, serve with porridge, fried with bean sprout, stream with tofu are among the thing you can do with salted fish. The origin to salting fish is as a food preservation because most fungus or bacteria cannot survive on highly salted environment. Fish salting use mineral salt which mostly consist of sodium chloride, NaCl. 

Salt is essential to animal live, but too much of it can proven to be hazard to health. Salted fish, chinese style has been classified by International Agency for Research Cancer, IARC as known carcinogenic to human (Group 1) meaning there are enough evidence to conclude that it can cause cancer in humans. Everything has it limits, for those salted fish lover, try go easy with the food and don't over consume. 

Malaysia's worst road tragedy

37 killed, 16 injured in Malaysia's worst road tragedy, after a bus carrying 53 plunged into a 60m ravine near Genting Highlands around 2.45pm 21st August, Wednesday. The 16 survivors comprised seven Malaysians, three Indonesians, four Bangladeshis, one Thai national, and one Korean.

The bus was carrying passenger going downhill when the driver lost control over the bus and plunge into the ravine. The bus was overloaded as its capacity was 44 passengers.

What remain of the bus....

Occupational Health in the workplace

When we talk about occupational safety and health, one tend to focus more on the safety aspect when it comes to identifying hazards. Hazards like falling object, sharp object on the ground, explosive material, welding spark, slippery floor and the most popular poor housekeeping, are always on the list. We tend to identify these hazard based on our observation and logic. But when it come to identify health hazard, it would require some expertise and experience.

Workers doing welding work will wear a face shield or safety goggles because they can see the spark flying around and concern for their eye, that's safety. But few wouldn't know about the content or effect of the welding fume that they inhale in. Welding fume contain a lot toxin gases depending on the type of welding and surface being weld. Amount the toxic fume contain manganese, nickel, chromium, lead, cadmium and etc. Manganese can cause Parkinson’s disease while nickel and chromium can cause lung cancer. You might not even feel anything now until 10 - 20 years later, then the disease appear. That's health. Check with your supervisor or employer if you are unsure of any potential hazard to health at your workplace.    

Toxin in peanut butter

Ever since the milk powder botulism scare, i am started to get cautions about the food we ate. One thing that come to mind is peanut butter. Some parents say don't feed your children peanut butter. A dog trainer told me never give peanut butter to dogs, it will poison them. Done some research and found out there is a toxin in peanut butter called aflatoxin.

Aflotoxin are synthesized by species of mold found naturally in plant or soil. The sickness cause by aflotoxin can defer by age, sex, possible mixture to other toxin and present body nutrition. The toxin will target liver organ. For children below 4 years of age. Their liver has not fully mature like adult, so they are more subjected to the toxin effect. Love our children but love them the correct way. Not everything that taste good for us will be good for them.  

To drink or not to drink:
China and Russia ban all Fonterra import. Malaysia recall certain milk powder brand. Fonterra Malaysia assure all Anmum product are safe to consume. 

Botulism is one of the most potent, lethal neurotoxin known. The neurotoxin is produced by bacteria called Clostridium botulinum and it paralyzes the person muscles and can be deadly.
The respiratory failure and paralysis that occur with severe botulism may require a patient to be on a breathing machine (ventilator) for weeks or months. The paralysis slowly improves. Botulism can be treated with an antitoxin which blocks the action of toxin circulating in the blood.