OSHA's Enforcement Budget Need Not be Limited by Expense Concerns

Every year as part of the budget process OSHA submits its request for funding. For 2013, OSHA requested $565.5 million, just under the 2012 appropriated amount of $565.8 million. Full details may be found in the "FY 2013 Congressional Budget Justification Occupational Safety and Health Administration." 

OSHA's anticipated expenditure is broken down between the various functions that OSHA performs as shown in the pie chart below (in $ thousands)

The federal enforcement part of the budget is an appropriation of $207 million and 1,580 FTEs (full time employee equivalents), which OSHA anticipates using to conduct a total of 43,100 federal inspections – 35,215 safety inspections, and 7,885 health inspections, compared to 40,961 inspections in 2012 (federal only).


There have been many discussions concerning the cost of enforcement versus the need to improve workplace safety and the limited resources available to OSHA (see also BP and West fertilizer). As Randy Rabinowitz  pointed out in the New York Times, with over 8 million workplaces federal OSHA can conduct an inspection of every facility only once every 131 years. However, this argument of limited resources for inspections may be false.

In 2012 OSHA issued a total of $266,988,844 in penalties and collected $173,206,213. The amount of penalties collected is 84% of the federal enforcement budget. All income from OSHA penalties goes directly to the US treasury (sec. 17(l) of the 1970 OSH Act) , presumably in order to avoid rich targets being more more heavily inspected.

However, like any large enterprise, costs typically are not linearly scalable with income. Hiring more inspectors will bring in more penalties but the cost will of course be higher. However, out of the operations funded by the $207 million budget for federal enforcement, some part of the funding will be indirect costs (utilities, office personnel etc.) whose costs are not proportional to the number of inspectors. Unless OSHA's enforcement division is unusually efficient, it is likely that these indirect costs will exceed 16% of the budget. 

The debate on whether additional inspection is required to improve safety or an unnecessary burden on industry will undoubtedly continue. However, this decision can be made by the US Congress on policy grounds and not based on budgetary concerns since it is likely that every additional dollar spent will result in at least one more dollar being returned to the US treasury.

Industry News: EPA Seeks comments about ETO Inhalation Carcinogenicity

The EPA recently published a request for public comments in the Federal Register "Notice of a Public Comment Period on the Draft IRIS Carcinogenicity Assessment for Ethylene Oxide". The comment period closes on 8/23/2013. The National Center for Environmental Assessment (NCEA), part of the EPA's Office of Research and Development has drafted a report titled "Evaluation of the Inhalation Carcinogenicity of Ethylene Oxide" available on the ISIS website. The first draft of this report was released in September 2006, and was revised following public comments, the second issue has now made its debut. The report summarizes the available evidence of carcinogenicity of EtO in humans and estimated the risk of developing cancer to someone as a result of exposure to EtO.

The two main conclusions of the report are that:

• The weight of evidence from epidemiological studies and supporting information is sufficient to conclude that ethylene oxide is carcinogenic to humans.

• Total cancer risk based on human data―lymphoid cancer incidence and breast cancer incidence in females is 1.80 × 10^-3.

The report explained that "The derivation of unit risk estimates, defined as the lifetime risk of cancer from chronic inhalation of EtO per unit of air concentration, for lymphohematopoietic cancer mortality and incidence and for breast cancer mortality and incidence in females, based on results of the recent analyses of the NIOSH cohort, is presented in the following subsections."

In other words, a woman exposed to 1 ppm EtO for her lifetime has a 0.18% chance of contracting either breast or lymphoid cancer due to this exposure, i.e. on top of the risk of developing these or other cancers due to others reasons.

This report is 174 pages long and so the brief summary here does not do it justice and therefore anyone interested is advised to download and read the report and perhaps offer comments to the EPA..

Chemical Management in HealthCare

A recent paper by Byrns, Nelson and Bradbury (The Importance of Good Chemical Management in Health Care, J. Occup. & Environ. Hyg. (2013), 10(7), D86-93) discussed their results from auditing two large hospitals for chemical management. Hospitals use a large number of chemicals from disinfectants by house keeping, sterilants by sterile processing and pharmaceuticals, especially antineoplastic drugs, by pharmacy and medical staff; and many of these chemicals pose significant risks to anyone exposed to them. The use of chemicals in the workplace, whether a hospital or in general industry is regulated by OSHA and the management of chemicals in the workplace is governed by OSHA's Hazard Communication Standard.

The goal of the HazCom standard is to inform workers of the risks of the chemicals that they use. The standard's philosophy is that if workers know and understand the risks of the chemicals they are using then they will be more careful and there will be fewer chemical related injuries. The HazCom standard includes requirements for labeling chemicals (recently revised under the Global Harmonization System), safety data sheets (SDSs), formerly MSDSs, and employee training as well as maintaining an inventory of all chemicals on-site.

Byrns et al found very poor adherence to the Hazcom standard. In the first hospital they audited they found that the facilities engineering department had 248 chemicals on-site, but there were SDSs for less than half of the chemicals (115) and only 114 of them were in the chemical inventory. On the positive side the authors found most of the workers knew which were the most hazardous chemicals, but the use of personal protective equipment was inadequate. Similar results were found with housekeeping.

Hospital 2 did not do any better in their audit. The facilities Engineering had poor control of their chemical inventory (46% of chemicals listed), the nursing and radiology had very poor control, but the sterile processing department was much better with over 90% of their chemicals listed.

On the positive side, there were no reports of serious acute exposures and the percentages of employees who said they had received training on how to use the chemicals in their workplace safely was 100% in Sterile Processing and Chemotherapy Nursing though it fell to 44% for Engineering and 0% for pharmacy.
The overall low focus on worker safety in healthcare is well documented (and well cited in the article), and the above results support this conclusion.

For comparison, ChemDAQ's informal survey at the recent IACHSMM show, which was discussed in a recent blog found that almost half of respondents (predominantly sterile processing personnel) said that they had never received training on the Hazcom standard, which indicates that the two hospitals taking part in the Byrns et al study may be been among the more progressive with regard to chemical safety.