NAS study questions whether OSHA rule needed
June 1, 2000 2 minutes read
NAS study questions whether OSHA rule needed
Just as one agency of the federal government gets ready to issue a new rule designed to protect health care workers and others against TB, another agency has begun looking at whether the need for such a rule exists. Last month, the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences began a new study titled "Regulating Occupational Exposure to Tuberculosis." The project will look at three questions:
1. Are health care workers at greater risk of infection, disease, and mortality due to TB than is the community in which they live? If so, how much additional risk do their jobs add?
2. Assuming there is a risk, which jobs carry the most risk? Can the risk be quantified for different work environments and job descriptions?
3. Finally, what will be the effect on the risk of OSHA’s new TB standard?
Making up the committee of professionals who must come up with the answers are:
• committee chair Walter Hierholzer, MD, professor emeritus of internal medicine, infectious diseases, and epidemiology at Yale University in New Haven, CT;
• Scott Barnhardt, MD, medical director of Harborview Medical Center and associate dean of the University of Washington school of medicine in Seattle;
• Henry M. Blumberg, MD, associate professor in the division of infectious diseases, department of medicine, at Emory University in Atlanta;
• Scott Burris, JD, faculty member of Temple University school of law in Philadelphia;
• Robyn Gershon, DrPH, associate scientist in the department of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore;
• Douglas Hornick, MD, associate professor in the divisions of pulmonary, critical care, and occupational medicine in the department of internal medicine at the University of Iowa in Des Moines;
• Pamela Moe Keller, RN, MPH, head of the program development unit at the Bureau of TB Control in the New York City health department;
• Stephen G. Pauker, MD, vice chairman for clinical affairs in the department of medicine and associate physician-in-chief at New England Medical Center in Boston;
• Robert C. Spear, PhD, professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley;
• Lester N. Wright, MD, deputy commissioner and chief medical officer for the New York State Correctional System.
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