What do you do to prevent yourself from chemicals?

Y

ybk

Registered Member
In the lab. or process/plant area, what do you do to get your body be safe from the harms effects of chemicals. You know it's very dangerous and unhealthy work . If you breath chemicals in long time then you would be probably sick in the future.

The prospectus and cautions are gives useful information and knowledge for us to be safe ourselves against harmful chemicals but is this enough?
Maybe in the future some other molecules will be determined as risky and harmful...
 
In chemistry lab our professor gave us some advice on working with cyanide: If you taste bitter almonds, run for the door. If you smell bitter almonds, don't bother running; you won't make it.
 
I made butyl sulfide in my school lab for a bad joke, and I can guarantee that people will run, even while vomiting.
 
What is your evidence that people working in labs are more unhealthy than average?
So long as poisonous fumes are extracted and not breathed, where is the problem?

People setting up amateur labs is a different matter.
They often severely injure themselves.
 
there is a problem with the title of this thread, it should say "safeguard" instead of "prevent".
 
In a professional lab, they would be using the safeguards.
Protective glasses, labcoats, gloves, fume extractors.

I'm not sure what this thread is about.
 
I worry more about the air we breathe for I always am breathing it as well as billions of others.


About 4,000 Toxic Chemicals Are Found in the Air We Breathe

The chlorine insecticides, like DDT, are known to move through the food chain and to make bald eagle lay paper thin shelled eggs or poison the milk of the Inuit (Eskimo) women. The amounts thrown on the fields may look minute but once these carcinogens enter the food chain in small levels, starting with the microscopic algae, it binds to the fat molecules and reaches an increasingly higher concentration (a process named biomagnification) while moving from algae to larvae, fish and eagle or to seal and Inuit.

That's why they were banned in the 70's in U.S. Thousands of everyday chemicals have been checked for their safety by assessing how easily they dissolve in water versus fat. The water-loving ones do not build up in the food chain. But this approach ignores another way for accumulation: air.

A new research has assessed how easily a chemical travels from the lungs into the air versus how easily it dissolves in fats and water. It appeared that thousands of contaminants can build up in air-breathing animals, if not water-breathing ones.
Many chemicals that dissolve relatively easy in water can persist in the air, accumulating "specifically in nonaquatic food webs: mammals, birds, human beings. In mammals and humans, we don't breathe water, we breathe air," said lead researcher Frank Gobas, an environmental toxicologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

His team checked about 12,000 chemicals under review by the Canadian government to assess their environmental and health effects; about 30 % of them could be stored by air-breathing organisms. One example is the pesticide lindane, employed on crops but also to treat head lice, which does not accumulate in fish but it does in Canadian wolves that had eaten caribou, which in turn had been feeding on lichen.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct...h4G4CQ&usg=AFQjCNHru6R3jqNAdopRljFhll-QpCAuaw
 
That's right.
You are probably safer inside the lab where the air is monitored.

Maybe the OP is about conditions in unregulated countries.
Or maybe doing your own experiments.

If the latter, do them outdoors on a windy day.
That way you won't kill yourself, possibly,
and everyone can share in your noxious results.
 
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Yes, cyanide kills you in more ways than Wonder bread makes you stronger (More than 12). It was this reason it was once thought to be a humane form of execution. Too bad, you would also need to find some way to keep it out of the general environment wherever you deployed it for executions. The neighbors might suffer health issues.

Then there was Love Canal. Anyone here remember that one? Because an industrial firm dumped something like 20,000 tons of trichloroethane at a local landfill where it leached into the water table, a whole community started getting Hodgkin's lymphomas and acute lymphocytic leukemias.

This incident is near and dear to me because although I didn't live there, the same chemical was used at our factory to machine parts and clean printed circuit boards. I suspected it was highly toxic as it had dissolved all but the stone from the leaky faucet stuck in the side of a 55 gallon drum of it stored behind the facility. We carried small quantities of it inside to work with, but did not store it in approved containers. Neither did we have adequate ventilation in some of those areas, nor even material safety data sheets to warn us about how dangerous a chemical this was. Needless to say, as the years went on, there was a lot of attrition at our plant from breathing the vapors, getting it spilled on bare skin, & etc. I think I got a speck of it in an open can of soda, and guess what? That's right, I got a malignant Hodgkin's lymph node on the side of my neck about 6 months later. It cost me a spleen (removed for radiotherapy), a thyroid gland (destroyed by the radiation), and oh, by the way, anything resembling a normal life until I somehow with some difficulty survived to the ripe old age I enjoy today.

The moral is: Don't be stupid: take all prudent precautions when dealing with solvents or dangerous chemicals. It could cost you your life, literally.
 
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krash661 said:
there's also such things as chem suits.
Click to expand...

Do you really believe that a company that cannot even afford to provide approved containers for chemicals could be convinced to buy employees chem suits, or perhaps provide for adequate ventilation?
 
oh, i'm sorry,
i'm not use to thinking about low level operations.

and why is this kind of company operating to begin with ?
yzarc.
 
i'm not clueless about operations on a scale like this.

odd,receives funding from the government to make equipment for nsa but has no money to buy equipment.
sounds fictitious to me.
also, explain what a surveillance manufacturer needs chem suits for,
i'm curious.
 
krash661 said:
i'm not clueless about operations on a scale like this.

odd,receives funding from the government to make equipment for nsa but has no money to buy equipment.
sounds fictitious to me.
also, explain what a surveillance manufacturer needs chem suits for,
i'm curious.
Click to expand...

?????

This is also your quote:

"there's also such things as chem suits."
"explain what a surveillance manufacturer needs chem suits for"
"there's also such things as chem suits."
"explain what a surveillance manufacturer needs chem suits for"
"there's also such things as chem suits."
"explain what a surveillance manufacturer needs chem suits for"

E R R O R ** E R R O R ** E R R O R

Go home NOMAD, you're drunk.
 
pathetically amusing.
(shakes head)
what ever.

and also, nice attempt of avoiding an answer.
just rambling incoherently.
nothing more.

you do not even realize that my chem suit pertained to the original topic question.
:)
that's why you're rambling incoherently.
 
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