Overall Program Assessment - Agriculture Forestry and Fishing Research at NIOSH - page 40

lead to the same set of circumstances that limited the effectiveness of the NASC,
that is, the inability to manage existing projects or approve new ones.
NIOSH has division, laboratory, and office facilities in Pittsburgh, Pennsylva-
nia; Morgantown, West Virginia; Spokane, Washington; Cincinnati, Ohio; Wash-
ington, DC; and Atlanta, Georgia. No information was provided regarding the
condition of those facilities, so it is not possible to assess their adequacy as pro-
duction inputs.
No specific production input information on extramural entities and partners
was provided.
Intramural and Extramural Research
Faced with a relatively small annual budget and what was characterized by
Congress as a national crisis concerning the health of farmers and other agricul-
tural workers, NIOSH made two pivotal and far-reaching decisions. The first was to
conduct intramural research in fields of science that appeared less well developed.
For example, NIOSH conducted ground-breaking work in endotoxin analysis and
assisted university-based scientists in describing respiratory effects of particulate
exposure in intensive animal production just as that industry was undergoing
marked production changes from small, family, largely outdoor operations with
little human exposure to large indoor facilities with the emergence of the inten-
sively exposed “8-hour/day” worker.
The second was to establish the Ag Centers: university-based, regionally dis-
tributed centers for research, training, and prevention (see Box 3-3). NIOSH was
able to encourage regional capacity development across the nation and to take ad-
vantage of the extensive support that is a characteristic of university-based research
and development. When the 1985 NIOSH-supported International Symposium
on Health and Safety in Agriculture was held in Canada, the majority of the little
science available was descriptive; there was almost no analytical research and vir-
tually no advanced training or prevention programs. That NIOSH was able, in a
period of less than 20 years, to stimulate the development of a legitimate scientific
field with new students being trained and good science being conducted across the
country has to be regarded as one of the major successes in linking government,
universities, and the private sector. Notwithstanding those accomplishments, the
committee concludes that a more tightly led cohesive program might have resulted
in more gains for AFF workers and their families.
The move to support regionally distributed, university-based programs as a
key aspect of the AFF Program has produced far-reaching effects on the quality of
research and training and on the diversity of subjects studied. In establishing the
university-based Ag Centers, NIOSH appears to have successfully predicted that,