Industrial hygiene in the world arena of occupational health and safety.
The professional industrial hygienist is a "man (or woman) for all seasons," with the ability to cope with a wide variety of problems affecting the health and safety of workers. The development of this profession, for which we in the United States can take credit, had its beginnings about the time of WWI when our chemical industry was beginning to expand and munitions had to be produced for the war effort. Today this professional expertise that is industrial hygiene is in demand in every industrialized country, and even the developing countries are realizing its potential benefit in prevention of occupational disease. In the last decade, which some call the OSHA decade, we have seen several important trends in this profession. The industrial hygienist has become a manager. He must be able to supervise industrial hygiene technologists and technicians. He has become an allied health professional in that he is doing the biologic monitoring heretofore done exclusively by physicians and nurses. In many companies he has been given organization status equal to that of the corporate medical director, and in some instances he has even been given corporate responsibility for overall health and safety. Industrial hygiene is truly a rewarding field for young people with backgrounds in engineering or one of the chemical, physical, or biological sciences. Several hundred are currently in training at the graduate level, but still the demand far exceeds the supply. The decade of the 80's should see even further advances in the field of industrial hygiene, especially in the development of more sophisticated instrumentation and the increased use of the computer in managing environmental and biological data and programming epidemiologic studies. To the academic institutions responsible for postgraduate training in this field, these rapid and profound changes in the professional requirements pose a real challenge, and continuing education courses will assume an even more important role.
D009787:Occupational Medicine / Q000639:trends*; D014481:United States