Commentary

Abstract

The practice of occupational hygiene, with our four-step model for effective practice, relies on expertise in many disciplines that range from biology (anticipation and recognition), through chemistry and physics (evaluation), to engineering (control). I have great concern that our field, in teaching and research, is moving rapidly away from engineering and toward biology. In this commentary I give evidence for this trend and the forces that I think are driving it, discuss its implications for worker health and safety, and make a plea for the continued importance of engineering controls as a central tenet of our field. It may just be that I am becoming a curmudgeon in my advancing years, but having spent my career as an academic teaching and doing research in occupational hygiene (OH), I am viewing trends in OH education and research with increasing alarm. We all believe in and practice the OH model that, when I was a student, had three phases but now has four—anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control. For simplicity, I will revert to the old model, which folds anticipation into recognition. In simple layperson’s terms, what we do under this model is recognize potential workplace hazards, evaluate hazards of concern, and control those hazards that are deemed to present an actual danger to workers (in public health terms this is primary prevention). The skills required to complete each step vary and range from biology in the recognition phase, chemistry and physics in the evaluation phase, and engineering in the control phase. Our students who pursue careers as practitioners must have some level of competence in each of these phases. It follows that OH academic programs must have faculty with strengths across this spectrum, but my perception and the point of this commentary is that most, if not all, academic OH programs are consciously and deliberately abandoning OH engineering and moving resolutely toward biology. What is the evidence for this claim? First we can look at the research interests of the current OH faculty. The NIOSH