Are you in compliance with OSHA’s Crystalline Silica Standard? (Pt. 2)
4. What are the symptoms?
The most common is chronic silicosis which develops for years undetected and doesn’t show up until 15 to 20 years of exposure. After many years if you have one or more of the following; shortness of breath, severe cough, fatigue, loss of appetite, chest pains, and fever after working with the above materials for many years. If you have these symptoms, then please go see a Doctor and get an X-ray of your lungs.
5. What can workers and employers do to prevent silicosis?
This is where AER Control Systems can help; AER Control Systems manufactures dust collectors with a HEPA filter as a final filter on all of their products. Think of the HEPA filter as a safety or back up filter to the filter before it so you not only do you get one very efficient filter but two and the second one is a HEPA filter providing 99.97% efficiency at 0.3 microns. Using a HEPA filter on the unit will guarantee that nobody will be exposed to silica in the shop once the dust is captured in the dust collector. You will still have to effectively capture the silica dust at its souce. This is accomplished by making sure you have the correct size unit for the application, please contact AER Control Systems with questions? 866-265-2372.
For more information about silicosis see the OSHA and NIOSH links below, these are just a fraction of the information available on the internet;
https://www.osha.gov/dsg/topics/silicacrystalline/
https://www.osha.gov/OshDoc/data_General_Facts/crystalline-factsheet.pdf
https://www.osha.gov/dsg/etools/silica/