LETTER

Design of measurement strategies for workplace exposures

M Topping

¹ Health Directorate, Health and Safety Executive, Rose Court, 2 Southwark Bridge, London SE1 9HS, UK; michael.topping@hse.gsi.gov.uk

Keywords: measurement; workplace

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

I write in response to the article by Hans Kromhout,¹ which sets out the case for exposure monitoring and proposes robust strategies for collecting data. He acknowledges that exposure monitoring may be expensive, but justifies it on the grounds that it is needed to ensure worker protection and data can be used for multiple purposes (hazard evaluation, control, and epidemiology). All this ignores the variety of competences and numbers of firms who use chemicals in the workplace.

We agree that good quality exposure data are extremely valuable for assessing the effectiveness of control measures, studies on health effects related to use of specific substances, and for long term epidemiological studies. Now that workers do not normally remain in one job all their working life and may be exposed to many chemicals in different industries, the lack of well validated exposure measurements is a concern. It will limit our ability in . . . [Full text of this article]

H Kromhout

² Environmental and Occupational Health Division, Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, Utrecht University, PO Box 80176, 3508 TD Utrecht, Netherlands; h.kromhout@iras.uu.nl

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