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Posted By Jason911
Can anybody help me? I don't seem to be able to find out how you can correctly assess your employees WELs in relation to flour.
Secondly I cannot find any information on how to conduct yourself, or get another party to conduct an 'airbourne monitoring'survey.
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks
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Posted By Adrian Watson
Jason,
You can monitor in accordance with MDHS 13/3 using personal sampling pump. If you need further help contact me on 07944 89632 or by email.
Regards Adrian Watson
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Posted By Merv Newman
Flour dust will be in the "nuisance" range of 5 mg per cubic meter. it ain't toxic. Monitoring is easy if you have a decent calibrated pump and can oven dry your filters. And you need a set of scales which will weigh in milligrammes. Otherwise go to contractors.
normally we say (correct me other H practitioners) that if you are less than 50% of the TWA (ie 2.5 mg) then you can be confident that there will be no overexposure.
You will, of course, already have looked at the possibility of organic dust explosions ?
Which have been known to blow out the odd silo.
Merv
Last week I was about 100 meters up at the top of a silo discussing the possibilities of drowning in sun flower seeds. Weird
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Posted By Paul Leadbetter
While the UK WEL for flour dust is 10 mg/m3, it is a sensitiser and I would want to see exposures as low as reasonably practicable and certainly less than 10% of the WEL.
Paul
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Posted By Adrian Watson
I would tend to agree with Paul. Flour is a respiratory sensitizer and exposure should be reduced ASAP.
The concept of a nuisance dust is an out-dated concept that no longer has credence in occupational hygiene or toxicology.
Regards Adrian Watson
Registered Occupational Hygienist
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Posted By Merv Newman
Adrian,
thanks for the correction. I thought I might be a bit out of date.
Merv
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Posted By Jason911
Thanks for the help. much appreciated.
A Final thought. Has anyone know of any cases of a person contracting occupational asthma due to contact with flour and what environment they were working i.e flour mill or small, medium or large bakery?
Many thanks
Jay
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Posted By Phil Grace
Jason,
You had better believe this stuff is hazardous...!!
Birmingham City Council paid £200,000 compensation to a school cook for fluor induced asthma.
In the NE a bakery paid one worker £57,000 and it is reported that a total of 10 other workers have received awards totaling £450,000.
Try entering compensation flour asthma into Google for more information. I would also suggest you study the HSE topic pages on occupational asthma.
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Posted By Descarte
Out of interest is flour dust also not an explosion hazard?
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Posted By David Bannister
Descarte - certainly it is. Try this link:http://www.chemeng.ed.ac.uk/~emju49/SP2001/webpage/intro/intro.html
The type of grain, its "fineness", the moisture content, atmospheric humidity and airborne concentration will all have a bearing on whether it will explode. The energy level of the spark too is a factor.
In general, flour dust is explosive!
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Posted By Jane Blunt Yes, flour dust can explode (and there have been many industrial accidents to prove it). Fortunately, just as with gases and liquids there are upper and lower explosive limits, and the lower explosive limit for dusts is generally way above the exposure limit. Hence if you are controlling the dust level to protect the health of the workers then you should not have a problem. I did the calculation for my kitchen and came up with the result that I would have to render 1.5 kg of flour airborne in order to run any risk of explosion. This web article is very informative: http://www.chemeng.ed.ac...01/webpage/deh/deh3.htmlIt is very informative, and I recommend you scroll both forward and back. The article explains why, even where you have controlled the dusts to protect the workers, you can still trigger explosions in certain circumstances. Jane
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Posted By LAB
Jason,
Flour dust has been assigned a WEL of 10mg.m3 in EH40/2005 and personal exposure monitoring can be undertaken using the HSE methodology MDHS 14/3 which should be available on the HSE website. If do require assistance with workplace exposure monitoring, please feel free to contact me on 07866 632245.
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