I am shifting gears with this blog post, away from HSE issues to discuss an easily preventable health issue, namely that associated with the widespread use of skin whitening products containing mercury.My close friend and colleague, Dr. Tom Murphy, recently published an interesting paper on this subject entitled Mercury Contamination of Skin Whitening Creams, Phnom […]
Category Archives: General
General HSE blogs
The Best On-Line HSE Resources
When I started my career, there were no PCs and no internet. Our education was obtained by attending classes, reading books, and most importantly though work experience. Today, one essentially has access via the internet to the collective global HSE knowledge-base. Unfortunately, direct access to what is practically an infinite resource is not without problems. We […]
Perceived Risk and Worker Safety in Developing Countries or Why Do They Do That?
The multifaceted, complex and widely misunderstood concept of “risk” has fascinated me for many years, dating back at least to the late 1980s in North America when I began my involvement in ecological and human health risk assessments projects. At that time, I was introduced to terms such as “voluntary” vs “involuntary” risk, “natural” vs […]
H&S, OHS, HSE, HSSE, HSSEQ, HSSEQ/CSR … Alphabet Soupization
In the 1970s, back when I was in high school/university and working summer jobs in Canada at construction sites and lumber yards, I do not remember ever running across a safety officer or in fact any sort of HSE professional at the job site.In the early 1980s, I worked as an environmental scientist and had […]
The HSE “Professional’s” Dirty Secret – Fake Credentials and Certifications
This topic was suggested to me by a blog reader, M.F., an HSE trainer from a country in South Asia, who commented on the dismal state of HSE in his country:“Organisations state that they are adopting HSE but in reality they don’t have HSE departments in their organisations. Secondly, most of the consultants or institutes […]