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This picture, from a video produced by authorities security researchers, exhibits a countertop employee utilizing a machine with a sprig of water that is supposed to regulate mud.
NIOSH
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NIOSH
This picture, from a video produced by authorities security researchers, exhibits a countertop employee utilizing a machine with a sprig of water that is supposed to regulate mud.
NIOSH
California is poised to change into the primary state within the nation to undertake particular measures to guard employees who make kitchen and loo counter tops out of a well-liked type of synthetic stone generally known as “quartz.”
That is as a result of increasingly countertop employees, virtually all Latino males, are coming down with an irreversible lung illness after inhaling harmful mud whereas chopping and grinding quartz and different stone supplies.
A minimum of ten have died. Others have wanted lung transplants.
The illness, silicosis, is attributable to silica mud that may fly into the air when a uncooked slab of countertop materials will get minimize to meet a buyer’s order. Whereas pure stone like granite accommodates silica, “engineered stone” manufactured from quartz accommodates much more, and public well being consultants have been warning of its elevated danger.
In California alone, officers have thus far recognized 77 sickened employees, says Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi, a pulmonologist on the College of California, San Francisco.
“Issues are heading within the route that we feared. We have had increasingly folks presenting very severely,” she says. “And so they’re all very younger.”
She and her colleagues have simply published a brand new report in JAMA Inside Medication describing dozens of silicosis instances in California’s countertop employees.
Nearly all had been Spanish-speaking Latino males who had emigrated from Mexico, El Salvador, or elsewhere in Central America. The median age was 45.
One of many employees included within the research is Ever Ramón, who started coughing and combating phlegm after 16 years of fabricating counter tops. In a office security video, talking in Spanish, he broke down as he described the day he discovered that his lungs had been badly broken.
“I by no means imagined that my work would hurt me a lot,” he mentioned.
This video was made by Georgia Tech’s Security, Well being, and Environmental Providers group with funding from the US Division of Labor as a part of a collection of coaching movies for employees within the countertop trade.
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The federal authorities locations a restrict on how a lot airborne silica a employee might be uncovered to, and mud might be managed utilizing moist chopping methods, satisfactory air flow, and respirators.
However in 2019 and 2020, security officers in California examined its countertop trade and found that about 72% of the 808 fabrication outlets working within the state had been “doubtless out of compliance with the present silica customary,” placing lots of of employees vulnerable to growing silicosis.
Because of this, California’s Occupational Security & Well being Requirements Board simply voted to fast-track the event of recent laws to maintain employees from inhaling mud whereas fabricating counter tops from supplies with a excessive silica content material.
In an e mail to NPR, a spokesperson for Cal/OSHA mentioned that it had “suggested the Board that it plans to carry an advisory committee in August and hopes to have an Emergency Short-term Commonplace proposal to the Board inside 3-4 months.”
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is even contemplating a ban on any such countertop materials.
Occupational well being consultants say there is not any purpose to consider this downside is confined to countertop makers in California. For the reason that first U.S. case of silicosis on this trade emerged in Texas in 2014, different sickened employees have been found in Colorado and Washington.
One latest case report from Florida recounted extreme illness in a 39-year-old undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who had been uncovered to silica by “handbook labor concerning stone chopping of quartz for fabrication of counter tops.”
“That is one thing that we have had, if you’ll, flashing warning lights about for a while,” says David Goldsmith, an occupational and environmental epidemiologist at George Washington College.
An estimated 100,000 folks work on this trade throughout the US. One research did silicosis screening on the 43 workers of “an engineered stone countertop fabrication facility” and found that 12 p.c had the illness.
If employees are undocumented or lack insurance coverage, they might be reluctant to hunt medical care, says Goldsmith, and medical doctors who aren’t anticipating to see silicosis can misdiagnose it as pneumonia or tuberculosis.
So whereas the brand new report of instances in California is a “very critical discovering,” he says, “I’m sure that that is an underestimate of the severity of the issue in California. And, by inference, it is an underestimate of the severity of the issue in the entire United States.”
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