Ok, I guess I'll use up some of the good will on this forum, but I can't sit still for another of these articles without a comment.
Karen died in 1997 for gosh sakes. The Right-to-Know laws for the chemical industry had been national for many years before this. Then individual states started passing Hazcom rules for everyone in the early 1980s. I987, the hazcom standard was national. So by the early 1980s, even people like me training in the arts were including ASTM F glove permeation charts in PPE training.
When Karen Wetterhahn's accident happened, Dartmouth's public position was "who knew?" I wanted our safety community to firmly say "Everyone knew, and you should have, too." But most went along with the Dartmouth PR. Now these new articles have a subtext that Karen's accident enlightened us to a new hazard and things are better because of her. And they say things like:
An extensive investigation by Dartmouth College and the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in
the spring of 1997 concluded that Karen's disposable latex
gloves were not adequate protection against dimethylmercury.
Glove testing done by a certified laboratory revealed that
dimethylmercury passed unimpeded through most glove
materials. (See Figure 1.)
OSHA's test was only confirmative for legal purposes. An "extensive investigation" was not needed because the ASTM permeation charts already showed that the organic mercury compounds went through most kinds of thick chemical gloves and that the thin mil examining gloves they were using were not recommended for use with chemicals by the manufacturer.
For this reason, the real point that should be made in these articles is that the chemistry departments at Dartmouth and a lot of other universities at the time were just not doing the proper OSHA training on gloves and it took a death and an OSHA citation to wake up the community. And what an utter waste of a promising life this was.
If you want to honor Karen Wetterhahn, write about the need for all university departments that handle chemicals to take some time to re-examine their training programs and to make sure all graduates leave school fully informed about the hazards of their work, the proper precautions, and the laws that apply to them. Otherwise, we stand a good chance of doing this kind of rationalizing again with other accidents that are not really accidents.
I will use only the OSHA citation when I discuss the Wetterhahn tragedy in my training on PPE, and none of this romanticized hype.
