As a start to what I hope will be a valuable discussion to all, and to fulfill a promise I made in another thread, here are some sources
For the convenience of all, here is the link to the NIOSH report on the SGB Gathering that Pam, Dale and others have posted:
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/hhe/reports...-0139-2769.pdf
In my opinion, this is a good report in many ways, but I find it disappointing in others. On page 7, where it talks about UV, it doesn't state what the lampworkers were doing when they made the measurements (soda-lime? boro? big? little?) Reading further on pages 7 and 8 about IR, the report focuses on 'furnaces' (annealing kilns, fusing kilns, glory holes or glass blowers pot furnaces??) but doesn't actually mention how much IR is radiated when someone is working either boro or soda-lime in a torch. At the end of the report, NIOSH states that beadmakers need to wear protective glasses to protect against broken glass, burns and IR hazards (they mention visible light hazards on page 5, too). Good, but the only eye-wear they mention is didymiums and AUR92's. Along with the Phillips equivalent, these glasses are what are, or have been recommended for soda-lime work. But are folks working boro safe with what they're doing and what they're wearing?
Feeling a little dissatisfied, I found a paper not referenced by NIOSH's report. Interestingly, it was published in 1997, the year before NIOSH did their survey at the SGB Gathering. This paper is:
Glassblowers' ocular health and safety: optical radiation hazards and eye protection assessment" by Olanrewaju M Oriowo, B Ralph Chou, Anthony P Cullen, published in Opthalmic and Physiological Optics, Volume 17, Issue 3, 1997. Pages 216-224.
The same authors wrote a companion paper
"Occupational exposure to optical radiation and the ocular health status of of glassblowers" published in Opthalmic and Physiological Optics, Volume 17, Issue 6, 1997. Pages 483-491.
I found these papers on the following website:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com
I'm not comfortable posting the actual articles themselves because where I found them is a 'pay-per-view' site and I don't want to violate any copywrite restrictions. For anyone interested in reading these from this site, it was ~US$30 per article.
As a summary for the benefit of those who haven't read either or both of these articles, both papers talk about what they feel is the significance of UV and IR to eye health. In the first paper the authors measured the radiation produced by soda-lime, pyrex, quartz and cobalt at UV, visible, and IR bands and then compared the results to recommended TLV's for each of those bands. They also measured the capabilities of didymium (four samples, in fact), grey polycarbonate, green polycarbonate, Filterweld(TM) and cobalt c2 glasses (they didn't seem to like didy's for any type of glass, by the way). They made these measurements at several glass-blowing facilities. Measurements were made with the hot glass object ~50cm from the worker's face. I think they tried to be sure the furnace was excluded when they made their measurements.
Their measurements show that soda-lime exceeds recommended TLVs by a factor of about 4 in both the visible and IR ranges (with no eye protection). Pyrex was a factor of 5 above the TLV in the visible range. They don't say how big the hot glass object's were in their measurements, however, so I don't know how this would scale to someone working smaller volumes of glass. There's also no measurements for the furnace, although that wouldn't necessarily help someone working at a torch.
The reports, above, have been out for 11-12 years, so I suspect someone here on LE has seen them before.
If so, what did you think of this information?
I haven't found any follow-up or newer measurements, or anything more specific to working a torch. Has anyone else?
Linda