By Jason Hagerman

In 1994, a young man was working in a laboratory in Maryland, using a rotary evaporator. The 25-year-old technician knew he was working with a reactive material, so he placed a shield between himself and the equipment, but he didn’t actually don any protective equipment. When he pushed the shield to the side to remove the flask, the contents exploded, sending glass fragments into his throat. He died, leaving behind a wife and an eight-month-old child.

According to Dr. James Kaufman, Founder and President of The Laboratory Safety Institute (LSI ), failure to make use of the safety gear available in the lab is one of the most prominent safety shortcomings related to apparel in labs today.

“In January of this year, a lab worker was transferring a pyrophoric material while working in her lab. The material sprayed out onto her sweater and caught fire. She died 18 days later from the burns,” says Kaufman. Lab coats made with Nomex are flameresistant, and would have made all the difference, but the worker wasn’t wearing hers. Kaufman sees a very simple solution to this all-too-common problem.

“Make working safely a condition of employment,” he says. The first time a worker is caught without proper protection, says Kaufman, a verbal warning should be issued; the second time, a written warning; and the third time it happens, the employee loses their job.

“These rules need to be enforced. At the end of the day, if the rules aren’t enforced, then you don’t have rules at all. Put these rules in writing otherwise you just have an oral tradition,” he says.

Heather Torrey, Scientific Customer and Channel Marketing Manager at Kimberly-Clark Scientific, agrees simply getting lab workers to wear safety gear is extremely important.

“In the lab, it should be the law. It should be just like putting on your seatbelt. As soon as you walk into the lab, put that stuff on,” she says.

Make it appropriate
There is a lot of apparel available to make workers safe, but it can’t all be used interchangeably.

“You need to avoid exposure to materials that can be absorbed through the skin or eyes,” says Eric Mead, a lab safety expert with a 30-year background in teaching safety, who currently runs a two-day lab safety workshop with the Chemical Institute of Canada and the Canadian Society for Chemical Technology (CIC/CSCT).

“There, you need personal protective equipment (PPE) that is good quality and appropriate.”

This means if you’re working with something like acetone or benzyne, a nitrile glove is perfectly fine. With strong acids and bases, a more heavy-duty neoprene glove is appropriate.

5 Tips to Improve Lab Worker Safety
1.	Workers must be completely aware of their surroundings, all the time. “Look at your lab as if it was an accident waiting to happen and observe what you can do to prevent that,” says Eric Mead, a lab safety expert with the Chemical Institute of Canada and the Canadian Society for Chemical Technology. “Know your exit routes.”
2.	Put things away. If you aren’t going to be using something in the next hour, it doesn’t belong on the bench.
3.	Expand your safety bubble. “Everybody’s got a personal safety zone; it’s like your conversation zone. You want to expand your safety zone to be aware of what your colleagues are up to. If you’re working next to somebody, you need to know what they’re doing and they need to know what you’re doing,” says Mead.
4.	If/when you transport chemicals of any kind, you should also have a spill cleanup kit with you that is appropriate for that specific chemical. If you’re walking along carrying a couple of litres of hydrochloric acid and you drop it, you can’t leave it on the floor while you go find a cleanup kit.
5.	Look at the storage of your chemicals and make sure that the organization is such that the hazard classes are well segregated. If possible, each class should be physically removed from each other. “This could be as simple as a good polyethylene container,” says Mead.

To be safe, every lab should test gloves before using them.

“Manufacturers give recommended uses for gloves, but they also recommend that users test the glove in their own lab space,” says Mead. “Take the glove off, dip it in whatever you have in the lab, go have a cup of coffee, and check the glove after. If the gloves break down, don’t use them in that situation.”

Gloves serve a dual purpose in the lab. Not only do they protect the user from the environment; they protect the experiment from the user.

“You don’t want to be contaminating your own experiments by something as simple as getting the oils from your hands into them,” says Jennifer Singh, Senior Industrial Product Manager at Microflex, a laboratory glove manufacturer. “When you’re wearing gloves, you’re not only protecting yourself, but your work.”

When two small drops of dimethylmercury landed on the latex gloves supposedly protecting Dr. Karen Wetterhahn’s hands at Dartmouth College, she thought nothing of it. Less than a year later, Wetterhahn died from exposure to the toxin. The gloves she wore were perfectly fine, but not appropriate for the task she was performing.

“Oftentimes, this is a safety factor. People just can’t differentiate between the different types of devices,” says Kaufman.

Eye protection is another area where appropriate use is an issue.

“In ordinary lab situations people tend to use impact goggles. If something breaks, and flying glass hits the goggle, they’re fine,” says Mead. “But they aren’t any good as splash protection, yet they’re being used in situations where splash protection is critical.”

Kaufman recently visited a university microbiology lab where students (and the instructor) were wearing woodworking goggles to protect against chemicals or biologicals in the eye.

When working with chemicals, appropriate goggles, which provide a tight seal around the orbital bone, and a facemask to protect the rest of the face, is a proper application of safety apparel.

Education in safety apparel is an extremely important part of lab safety. “Did your immediate supervisor sit down with you on the very first day and talk with you about the importance of safety and help you to learn, in detail, about the safety system?” asks Kaufman. “When I’ve asked this, I get five per cent saying yes; one person in 20. I had 250 forensic scientists at a meeting and asked that question and not one person put their hand up.”

According to Kaufman, it is the responsibility of the supervisor to make sure the hazards are identified and to make sure that the right PPE is available and used. The earlier a worker learns about safety, the better.

“You will never have a day like a worker’s first day to show them that health and safety matters,” he says.