Re: Laboratory Safety Information

Richard Covington — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:10:07 GMT

Happy New Year Marlene,

The information that you provided is all too important in the medical clinical laboratory. We as laboratorians have to make use of the MSDS material when we are not sure of a chemicals harm to us. Some of these chemicals can cause irreversible damage to us, less known take our life away. Even common house hold chemicals can pose a threat to our safety. Not to long ago i worked as a dialysis technician at a dialysis facility. I put patients on dialysis machines and monitored the dialysis process. Also, I assisted with machine maintenance, stewed up chemicals used in dialysis process and disinfection of equipment. Two main chemicals were bleach and vinegar. Apparently, administrators were not aware of the potential hazards of using bleach and vinegar because there were no MSDS's available for use of these common house hold products. Unfortunately, the personal protective equipment available was not enough to keep these chemicals from eating my lab attire and causing skin irritation. I discussed the problem with my supervisor. She informed the administration but they failed to provide adequate personal protective equipment. I had no choice but to inform OHSA. OHSA investigated and discovered my complaint to be valid. Administration was given 30 days to correct the situation but failed to do so. This lead to my resignation. OSHA followed up with some sort of action that I'm not aware of. Other dangerous chemicals at the clinic were formulin. Formulin is used to clean dialyzers. Occassionally formulin penetrated my mask. It felt like I was breathing in tear gas. On one occassion formulin spilled on a techs shoes penetrating his socks causing him to be rushed to the hospital. MSDS's were available but he didn't take time to read them. Please be careful with chemical in the lab.

Laboratory Safety Information

Marlene Frazier — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:25:02 GMT

I am working on publishing some information on laboratory safety on-line, and I thought that members here would be interested in some of the information. I am going to provide a link to the first article that I wrote regarding the reading of MSDS sheets. If it is helpful to anyone please let me know and I will continue to post links as I write the articles. If it is not helpful, also let me know because I don't want to bog down the posts if the information is of no use. Thank you.

http://hubpages.com/hub/What-is-an-MSDS-and-why-should-you-care

Lab Perspectives: Forums

Re: Laboratory Safety Information

Laboratory Safety Information