Importance Of Industrial Hygiene In The Workplace

Industrial hygiene is not a subject that is new to the workplace. “There has been an awareness of industrial hygiene since antiquity. The environment and its relation to worker health was recognized as early as the fourth century BC when Hippocrates noted lead toxicity in the mining industry (OSHA 3143 - Industrial Hygiene)”. Earlier scientists and scholars, long before modern society like, the German scholar, Agricola, who invented the idea of wearing a protective mask for workers and introduced the concept of mine ventilation to protect the miners, Bernardo Ramazzini “the father of industrial hygiene”, Ulrich Ellenborg and many others begin to take notice of how the environment was having an effect on the worker’s health and well-being (OSHA 3143 - Industrial Hygiene). There was a new-found devotion and dedication to finding out the causes of the workplace illnesses of the time. Scientist and scholars set out to discover why workers were developing disease and sickness and what could be done to prevent or control the discomfort they were experiencing. Not only the discomfort of workers but also the families in these mining communities. There is a science and an art to approaching these problems and coming up with solutions. There was

The impact on how hazards are recognized and evaluated and how to manage exposure and how exposure is dangerous teaches that anything entering the body has the potential to be harmful at some level that is deemed excessive. IH has great bearing on the control methods used from the design stage of a plant, factory or work area during the engineering phase to the training and administrative stage to the proper wearing of protective equipment all done to create a safe work environment (Plog, 1988) in order of