Health Monitoring - Occupational Health and Workplace Monitoring at Chemical Agent Disposal Facilities - page 18

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Health Monitoring

This chapter discusses CSDP monitoring of em-
ployee health status as it relates to the workplace. A
responsible industrial operation involving hazardous
substances must have an effective occupational and en-
vironmental health program to monitor workers for
health effects that might result from unknown expo-
sures to chemical or physical agents during normal
operations or from accidental exposures during upset
conditions.
Based on recent Stockpile Committee reviews of the
operational history of the incinerator-based chemical
disposal operations at JACADS and TOCDF (NRC,
1999a) and the integrated designs for the liquid-based
processing technologies at Newport and Aberdeen
(NRC, 2000a), the Army has clearly made significant
efforts to design safe systems at both types of facilities.
Moreover, it is also apparent from these reviews that
the Army has instituted mechanisms and procedures
for operating these facilities in ways that minimize
worker exposures to harmful substances.
In this chapter, the occupational and environmental
health programs at JACADS, CAMDS, and TOCDF,
and, by extension, those planned for the additional
seven sites, are reviewed and evaluated.

trial activities. The primary focus of occupational and
environmental medicine is on the prevention of occu-
pational injuries and illnesses, rather than on treatment,
and on the prevention of occupationally related harm
to public health and the environment.
The goal of employee health monitoring is to ensure
that measures to protect the employee from workplace
hazards are effective by carrying out medical surveil-
lance programs for the early detection of adverse health
effects. The types of chemical or physical hazards en-
countered determine the nature of the medical surveil-
lance or health monitoring programs.
Monitoring employee health is one part of the expo-
sure assessment in the risk assessment paradigm. The
second part is workplace monitoring, the subject of
Chapter 2 of this report.
The practice of occupational and environmental
medicine relies on the profession of industrial hygiene
to assess the effectiveness of procedures, including
work practices, engineering controls, and personal pro-
tective equipment, for protecting employee health. The
degree and type of worker protection required during
operations involving chemicals are based on available
toxicity information for the substances involved. Gen-
erally, this information is obtained from studies on
laboratory animals. However, human data may also be
available, especially for chemicals that have been in
use for some time; in the case of chemical warfare
agents, for example, there is a fairly extensive animal
and human exposure database that is regularly re-
viewed and assessed (NRC, 1997b, 1999c). Physical
hazards, such as noise, heat, vibration, radiation of vari-

FUNCTION OF AN OCCUPATIONAL AND
ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PROGRAM

The function of an occupational and environmental
health program is to protect and promote the health and
safety of employees and to protect the public and the
environment from hazards that may arise from indus-

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