I've been sending headlines from google about chemical health and safety events since February 1, so we're finishing the first three months of that habit. I thought I would provide a quick summary of the statistics I was able to easily generate from this data. If you're interested in exploring the information that's been gathered, you can use the filtering functions at http://delicious.com/acsdchas/ to focus on particular kinds of events. Anyway, the brief numbers are: Time period: Feb 1 to April 30 2010 314 incidents reported by google; the search terms varied slightly during that period but are becoming more standardized. 233 of the events reported occurred in U.S. Type of Event 67 fires 53 explosions 38 spills 28 leaks Sector of Event 106 in industry 41 in transportation 41 illegal activities 35 in labs 36 at home Consequence 124 public responses were the highest consequence reported 74 report injuries 30 report death Chemicals involved: (This is the hardest category; I began trying to identify this from the media report about half way through the time period studied and the media is not always trustworthy in this respect) 29 unknown chemicals involved 6 cleaning chemicals 4 formaldehyde 4 agricultural chemicals 4 ethanol This is still an experimental issue, but I think useful in providing some context for discussions about chemical safety issues and particularly in terms of gathering anecdotes for educational purposes. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for improving this effort. - Ralph Ralph Stuart secretary**At_Symbol_Here**dchas.org Secretary Division of Chemical Health and Safety American Chemical Society
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