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Biomedical subjects

B I Castleman

Publications and source records attributed to B I Castleman.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1989

Threshold limit values: historical perspectives and current practice.

A 1989 Occupational Safety and Health Administration standard mandates that workplace air concentrations be held below new permissible exposure limits for 376 substances. As more than 350 of these limits came from the 1987 list of "Threshold Limit Values" (TLVs), the medical basis of the TLVs is of direct importance to the health of millions of workers. However, the TLV development process has been gravely flawed by lack of scientific rigor, inadequate medical input, and lack of attention to financial conflicts of interest. The adoption by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of many poorly supported values as permissible exposure limits reflects also the underutilization of industrial medicine in identifying health effects of exposures below the TLVs. It is thus the responsibility of the medical profession to act on the presumption that the TLV permissible exposure limits are unsafe limits until a sound underlying body of medical and scientific literature exists for the substances on the list. It is industry's responsibility to commit itself seriously to medical and exposure monitoring and to begin to remedy the knowledge deficit that exists about the less immediate health effects of most industrial materials.

Air Pollutants, Occupational↗
PubMed1988

Corporate influence on threshold limit values.

Investigations into the historical development of specific Threshold Limit Values (TLVs) for many substances have revealed serious shortcomings in the process followed by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists. Unpublished corporate communications were important in developing TLVs for 104 substances; for 15 of these, the TLV documentation was based solely on such information. Efforts to obtain written copies of this unpublished material were mostly unsuccessful. Case studies on the TLV Committee's handling of lead and seven carcinogens illustrate various aspects of corporate influence and interaction with the committee. Corporate representatives listed officially as "consultants" since 1970 were given primary responsibility for developing TLVs on proprietary chemicals of the companies that employed them (Dow, DuPont). It is concluded that an ongoing international effort is needed to develop scientifically based guidelines to replace the TLVs in a climate of openness and without manipulation by vested interests.

Acrylonitrile↗
PubMed1979

The export of hazardous factories to developing nations.

The export of hazardous industrial plants to developing nations is examined for a number of industries. As hazardous and polluting industries come under increasing regulation in industrial nations, some of the affected processes are exported, without improvements to make them less hazardous, to nonregulating countries where cheap and uninformed labor is abundant. "Runaway shops" then market their products in industrial nations with the competitive advantage of not having had to comply with costly workplace and pollution-control regulations. The international trade impacts of hazard export include: export of jobs from regulating to nonregulating countries; shift of international balance of payments in favor of nonregulating countries; export of mortal health hazards and environmental destruction to workers and communities in nonregulating nations, in order to produce goods for consumption by the regulating countries; weakened competitive position of reputable manufacturers who incur control costs and complete in domestic and would markets against less scrupulous companies; prolonged widespread use of discredited, extremely hazardous technologies, arising from the continuing "subsidy" of certain industries by workers and communities exposed to uncontrolled, well-recognized, mortal health hazards; and aggravated international relations resulting from developing nations' awareness and concern over becoming dumping grounds for hazard export from industrial nations.

Air Pollutants↗