How BSI is Creating Health and Safety Standards to Protect the Public from COVID-19.

Posted on February 25, 2021 by Graham Freeman

Before 2020, most people who didn’t work in health and safety or who weren’t required to wear PPE for their job knew what the acronym means. By March of that year, the coronavirus pandemic had ensured that the term personal protective equipment (PPE) was now on everyone’s lips.

Since then, news reports and social interactions have been dominated with discussions about masks. Health agencies, governments, and private businesses have provided guidance and policies about wearing masks in public, while the early stages of the pandemic saw massive supply chain failures endanger the flow of critical supplies of PPE like N95 respirators to the healthcare workers who needed them most. Since most people don’t typically keep a supply of personal PPE such as masks available to them at all times, the mandates requiring masks in public created a surging demand for cloth masks, which was met by various entrepreneurs, clothiers, and … Read more...

Breathing a Sigh of Relief: The Answers to the CDC’s Top Ten FAQs on Respirator Use

Posted on September 16, 2020 by Farhana Ahmad

If “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” then the importance of wearing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) during this post-pandemic time is beyond critical. Within this category of equipment, respirators are high on the list. However, given that it is quite an advanced piece of equipment (compared to some of its counterparts), users can often have questions in terms of how to best use them.

This brings us to the objective of this blog: to provide you key best practices and the answers to the to the CDC’s top 10 FAQs on respirator use.

What Are Respirators and Why Are They Important?

Let’s take a step back and start from the definition of what a respirator is. Basically, a respirator is a device worn over the face or head which covers the nose and mouth areas. By design, they are also used to reduce the wearer’s risk … Read more...

OSHA’s Most Common Citations: Respiratory Protection Programs

Posted on August 2, 2018 by Dan McLean

It’s all about breathing easy.

In this ongoing series of blogs about the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Association’s (OSHA’s) list of 10 most cited standards, we now come to the issue of respiratory protection programs.

Sometimes, the best way to protect workers against airborne chemicals in the workplace is to use respirators. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as buying some facemasks out of the respiratory protection catalog and handing them out to workers. A respiratory protection program requires a fair bit of legwork to create and implement.

You may need a respiratory protection program (29 CFR 1910.134) if your workers are exposed to a hazardous level of an airborne contaminant, and their exposure cannot be reduced below the OSHA permissible exposure limit through the use of engineering controls (for example, substitution or mechanical ventilation), or if workers are exposed to oxygen-deficient atmospheres. You may also require workers to … Read more...