Relation of OSHA Lab Standards to other Lab Standards

The OSHA Laboratory Standard was out in place to address the safety and health of the workers in the lab. These standards supersede existing OSHA health standards because they are specifically intended for labs, however the general duty clause carries over into the laboratory requiring the employers to free the space from all recognized hazards. These hazards are commonly defined as any hazard you can identify with your senses; an example of a hazard under the general duty clause would be broken glass on the ground. The general duty clause also requires all employees to “comply with occupational safety and health standards and all rules.” Other standards of the Occupational Safety and Health Act that transition over to the lab standards are: possible skin or eye contact, standards which set Permissible Exposure Limits or PELS, and lab standards that require exposure monitoring and medical surveillance. PELS are legal limits that were set by OSHA in 1970 and require full compliance. If the PEL is exceeded then proper controls must be implemented to limit the worker’s exposure: personal protective equipment, shorter shifts, engineering controls. There are thousands of chemicals used in industries every day and OSHA does not regulate all of them, some have not even been tested fully. Another limit set by OSHA is the Threshold Limit Value, which control the concentration of substances in the air that workers are subject to day after day so there are no adverse health effects in the short or long-term. The standard is an average over an average eight hour shift for a forty hour work shift.  Another way that OSHA makes sure a worker is in compliance with a certain exposure is by calculating their TWA, or Time Weighted Average, which is when you take the workers exposure multiplied by the time exposed for each segment of time and then divided by the total time. OSHA also has standards for short term sampling called STEL, or Short Term Exposure Limit, which are typically 15 minutes long. However, these STEL standards are only published for compounds with very toxic effects with only acute exposures. OSHA also has ceiling limits implemented for those fast acting compounds that could be more hazardous to workers. Worker exposure should never exceed three times the TWA for no more than a total of thirty minutes for the entire work day.

The OSHA lab standards go deeper into the hazardous substances area with regulations. This is under OSHA Hazcom standards within the workplace. These include: reproductive toxins, carcinogens or cancer causing compounds, and compounds that cause high acute toxicity. For a compound to be regulated as a carcinogen it must be listed as a known carcinogen on the Annual Report on Carcinogens, listed as a group one carcinogen towards humans, and are known to cause significant occurrence of tumors in animals. Reproductive toxins are known to effect the reproductive systems in both males and females after repeated exposure. Chemicals are evaluated, assessed, and then implemented under OSHA. These are all defined under the Chemical Hygiene Plan.