"International collaboration with organizations such as ISP is critical to enabling effective respiratory protection for the global work force,” said Maryann D’Alessandro, Ph.D., director of the NIOSH Pittsburgh-based laboratory. “These partnerships help promote international stability for U.S. business, continue the tradition of U.S. technological leadership globally and provide information that we can use in turn to further worker health and safety in the U.S."
Technical experts from the Pittsburgh laboratory and from NIOSH’s Global Collaboration Program came together with their counterparts from ISP in Santiago, Chile, to conduct educational workshops. The NIOSH team addressed topics such as the process used by NIOSH to test and certify respirators for workplace use, NIOSH’s testing and quality control of approved products to ensure proper ongoing service, selection and use of respirators on work sites both in the United States and Chile (including the ISP guidelines) and the importance of certification. Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, respirators intended for use in the workplace must be certified by NIOSH.
The 70 participants included representatives from the Ministry of Health and Labor, the International Labor Organization, multinational manufacturers of PPE, various academic bodies and industrial sectors such as construction and mining. In addition to the workshops, the NIOSH team conducted six audits on respirator manufacturers in Colombia, Chile and Brazil to assess if their products continued to meet the requirements necessary to maintain their NIOSH respirator certification status.
In Latin America, education on the proper selection and use of respirators is a high priority due to the large number of workers who use respiratory protection daily. According to an ISP survey, 80 percent of the respirators used in the workplace in Chile have been certified by NIOSH, assuring a high level of protection for those users when the devices are selected and used properly. Manufacturers and government regulators in this part of the world recognize the unique benefit of the NIOSH certification process as one of the factors contributing to the goal of a global standard for respirators.
In the spirit of this goal, during their time in Latin America the NIOSH representatives were able to strengthen relations with FUNDACENTRO in Brazil, an advanced laboratory in the process of developing educational products related to personal protective equipment. FUNDACENTRO is open to collaborating with the ISP and NIOSH, further fortifying the Pan American cooperation and relationship between these three organizations from the World Health Organization’s Occupational Health Network.