Land mines are really effective in some parts of the world because there isn’t the technology to find them before they go off and do a lot of damage to lives and limbs.

As safety officers and workers, it would be nice to be able to know where all the dangers are before we encounter them, so we can be truly proactive in our work to mitigate people having to be “guinea pigs” for the benefit of others. In one of these areas where a road map would be helpful is in the area of chemicals, especially involving products that are not raw chemicals but have various concentrations of chemicals in them. Having this information can help us be safe and provide proper safety guidance to our workers and supervisors.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Charles Nadeau via a Creative Commons license]

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Charles Nadeau via a Creative Commons license]

Thanks to some researchers at Johns Hopkins University, we may well have that road map to the chemical “land mines.”

It is reported in a recent issue of Professional Safety magazine that this group of researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health developed a catalog of more than 10,000 chemicals for which there is significant safety and hazard data, and used that information to develop a predictive model for upwards of 90,000 other products and materials with chemicals in them, for which there is no or very little similar data or research.

What the researchers developed came from a database of more than 800,000 research studies conducted on about 10,000 chemicals that are registered in Europe, and they broke these chemicals up into groups based on toxicity, using information from the studies that determined symptoms of exposure, toxicity risk, volatility and other factors. Based on that information, a computer model can take one of these “unknown” chemical substances, plug it in and determine its toxicity level and hazards based on the known chemicals with which it seems most similar.

Thomas Hartung, leader of the research team, said that people are exposed to more than 100,000 different chemicals in various products on a nearly daily basis, and that it would be much too expensive to conduct tests and research on all of them. But at the same time, “we are missing 90 percent of the safety information we need,” Hartung said.

“We want to make it possible that any substance – even one not yet synthesized – can be entered into the program and its possible safety problems can be predicted,” Hartung said.

What is hoped is that this new map will help safety officers be proactive in their dealings with some of these chemicals, and manufacturers of these different chemical-based products can learn more about the toxicity of their current chemicals and find a different one that is safer but can do much of the same work that the original intended.

If you would like more information about this chemical map, you can check out this link.