From: "Stuart, Ralph" <Ralph.Stuart**At_Symbol_Here**KEENE.EDU>
Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill
Date: Mon, 17 May 2021 12:36:01 +0000
Reply-To: ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU>
Message-ID: B1952BDB-1000-4C78-8648-6CFE9C0AFC8B**At_Symbol_Here**keene.edu
In-Reply-To <953107258.1226994.1621164006123**At_Symbol_Here**mail.yahoo.com>


> >This Marr article shows what a lot of work she had to do to track it all down from scratch. The fact that Marr felt it necessary to do both her own research and learn everything that researchers did in the past did step by step in order to overturn their old theories is so wasteful of her very precious time.
>
Just for the record, according to the article, the research into the literature was done by a graduate student in search of a thesis rather than Dr. Marr herself. Grad students are the ones whose labor is cheap enough to actually read the historical literature rather than rely on most recent scholarly articles being published.

One of the things that the Covid response demonstrated to me is that the technical community (including researchers, clinicians and field practitioners) is as susceptible to the hot take mentality as the mainstream media. A lot of the mainstream media discussion around Covid transmission in 2020 centered around medical infection control practices, while appropriate for a hospital setting, did not translate well to other environments. For example, while there was a lot of discussion about which specific masks worked the best for who, the fact that masks were only one (smallish) part of the Covid control system rather than its corner stone did not make headlines.

It is interesting to me that the ACGIH‰??s COVID-19 Resources released last week at https://www.acgih.org/covid19/ discuss the various elements of the infection management system in a more holistic way. However, I‰??m not sure that many people outside the industrial hygiene profession can work with this guidance successfully given the amount of situation specific interpretations they require. For example, all but one of the references they cite for ventilation practices are from before Covid emerged.

Kind of reminds me of hazard management in the ever-evolving chemistry lab ;).

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
Environmental Safety Manager
Keene State College
603 358-2859

ralph.stuart**At_Symbol_Here**keene.edu

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