ah, from your lips to the universe. However, you have no idea how many schools use the NFPA diamond as their OSHA label. No matter how much I tell them that it is not for that purpose, they have rolls of stickers and fill out the numbers from the MSDS and put the name of the chemical on the thing and think they are done.
And I don't even like the toxicity rating for firefighters. Many carcinogens, again, are not listed as highly toxic on MSDSs or the NFPA diamond because not every agency has listed them. Two out of three is not good enough for some of the manufacturers. So the fire fighters survive the initial response but have problems later.. That's not acceptable. They need to know when chronic hazards are associated with the chemicals. Firefighters already have higher rates of cancer from smoke exposure.
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve McLean <steve_mclean**At_Symbol_Here**BYU.EDU>
To: DCHAS-L <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**MED.CORNELL.EDU>
Sent: Thu, Jun 6, 2013 2:28 pm
Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] NFPA and OSHA, Harmony?
Keep in mind that the NFPA diamond is designed for
FIREFIGHTERS, NOT chemists and laboratory personnel. In most cases, a firefighter does not care
about the exact value of the LD50. Water is toxic in a sufficiently high dose, but in a fire situation a firefighter is going to consider it a "0" - no health hazard - regardless of the amount that is present.
As a chemist who spent 12 years on a professional industrial firefighter crew, I can tell you that most firefighters care about the following: Is it highly
flammable or not? Is it water-reactive or not? Is it a serious health hazard or not? Is it reactive or not? If the answer is "not", then a ZERO makes perfect sense.
Monona is correct: "We have a real chance here to finally teach people something
real and useful in hazcom. Let's not confuse the issue with the NFPA diamond."
My translation: "We need to teach people about the hazards, but we need to make sure people
know the difference between GHS and NFPA so they don't confuse them."
We should allow GHS to teach us about Hazcom, but we should also allow the (unaltered) NFPA diamond to provide the BASIC information that is needed by firefighters.
If you cannot tell the difference between a NFPA diamond and a GHS pictogram with its associated class and category, regardless of their different scaling system, then you should not be working with hazardous materials.
I'm hoping the NFPA diamond would be either dropped or seriously revised. The very idea that "toxicity" can be represented by a single number from 0 to 4 is misleading. First,
there is no "zero" toxicity as NFPA seems to indicate. So the GHS idea of going from high numbers for low toxicity to 1 for highly toxic is better from the get-go.
And the GHS understands that extreme acute toxicity, lower levels of acute toxicity, and chronic toxicity need to be handled separately--especially because many
carcinogens and reproductively hazardous substances are acutely non-toxic as demonstrated by LD50s and LD50s, skin/eye damage, respiratory and other acute expressions of toxicity.
We have a real chance here to finally teach people something real and useful in hazcom. Let's not confuse the issue with the NFPA diamond.
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