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Previous by Date: Subject: [DCHAS-L] Information and News: Lead in Flint Michigan Wather System Date: Thursday, January 21, 2016 12:51:29 PM Author: "Secretary, ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety" <secretary**At_Symbol_Here**DCHAS.ORG>

Next by Date: Subject: [DCHAS-L] Pacificchem lab safety presentations Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2016 14:24:51 -0500 Author: "Secretary, ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety"

> What qualifications were required to publish a MSDS, especially after legal disclaimers were applied?

I know that there are chemical safety professionals who put a lot of time and care into authoring MSDS's, but it's not clear to me percentage of the MSDS's I see they are involved with. The transition from MSDS to SDS does seem to have helped in moving MSDS authorship out of the lawyer's purview into more technically oriented hands.

> > first you have to accurate information regarding the chemical, physical or biological hazards involved to analyze which is the most important hazard and only then, can they be prioritized.

The challenge, of course, is that in the laboratory environment, this may involve collecting information on many different chemicals and if you use the hazmat standard of three independent sources that agree in collecting the information, the barrier to actually conducting the work mounts steadily.

> > I discovered this past week while developing SDSs for new compounds that one of the most important criteria is to cite/document your sources for each element of the SDS.

That's one thing I've come to appreciate over the last couple of years of work with CINF professionals - how often a piece of safety data is cited with no attribution of the source, so that those "three independent sources" may have the same origin. I agree clear identification of the source of the information is core to literate use of the safety information and a significant failure of SDS's in general.

That one advantage of the PubChem LCSS's available at
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/lcss/
They provide convenient access to the name and website of the source of the hazard information.

Of course, the next step is to convert the hazard information into risk information, which can't be done unless you have a clear process description, including local information about the place where the work is being conducted.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart, CIH
rstuartcih**At_Symbol_Here**me.com

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