"When people think of Health & Safety, they think about “the Seen” hazards like a cut on the finger or someone falling off a ladder which falls under Safety. Whereas with Health or Occupational Health, we are often dealing with “the Unseen” hazards such as chemicals, noise and radiation. One can have exposure to a health hazard every day and not know it, but in fact be hurting themselves as it can take years for illnesses such as cancers, blood and nervous system disorders to develop!"
Jeffrey B Miller - TERACHAIN™ Founder and CEO
The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates worldwide there are around 160 million work-related illnesses every year. Out of these numbers, there are approximately 2.78 million work-related deaths of which 2.4 million are from workplace illnesses with 41% coming from exposures to hazardous substances such as toxic chemicals, pesticides, and radiation. This equates to 2 workers dying every minute or every 30 seconds just from exposures to hazardous substances. So why is this happening? The contributing factors are given below.
Every 2.5 minutes a new Chemical Abstract Service (CAS) number is added to the registry with the number of chemical substances now exceeding 136 million. However, there are only 500 enforceable exposure limits to protect people from this large number of chemicals.
There are only about 20,000 industrial hygienists (IHs) to help characterize and protect the 1.4 billion employees globally that work with hazardous substances. That means there is 1 IH for every 70,000 employees which is not enough to protect all these employees.
There are several resources available for workplace health hazards; however, no one has solved the problem to tie everything together. The true numbers of work-related illnesses are unknown since there is no system in place to help verify these numbers except by doing investigations of each of the cases.
The Solution
Industrial hygienists (IHs) are the ones who conduct exposure monitoring by using sophisticated equipment along with analytical methods to detect the extent of worker exposure to biological, chemical, ergonomic, physical and psychosocial health hazards. However, there is a shortage of IHs as mentioned above as being one of the main contributing factors for an increase in workplace illnesses.
To help with this Global Occupational Health problem, TERACHAIN™ was created.
It is important to have a repository to store all the health hazards along with their control recommendations in one location to make it easier to access the information. This increases efficiency allowing more time to be spent in the field.
Due to the shortage of resources, TERACHAIN™ was designed to bring health hazards along with task, work and environmental conditions together to provide control recommendations into one easy to read document known as a Task Exposure Risk Assessment or TERA.
Companies must take measures to be in compliance with regulations such as Hazard Communication, Personal Protective Equipment and Respiratory Protection; however, every year there are companies that get fined for not being in compliance. TERACHAIN™ has several features to help companies be more compliant.
Complete the Occupational Health Survey to determine for yourself! The survey will let you know what Occupational Health Risks you have.