Source: USAF System Safety Handbook
Biomedical Safety
The law of the land, executive order, and Air Force policy
require that each employee be provided employment and that
the employment place be safe, healthful, free from recognized
hazards, that environmental pollution from weapon systems,
operations and other activities be controlled. This cannot be
accomplished with passive avoidance of hazards but requires
an aggressive effort beginning with the acquisition of all
systems and continuing through the establishment of health
and safety programs.
The term biomedical, as used in the Air Force and in this
manual, refers to physical and chemical agents which impact
on the health and well being of humans. Chemical agents,
which may have a negative effect on man, may be hazardous
because of their toxic, corrosive, flammable, or reactive
nature. Physical agents include all forms of sound and
vibration, all forms of electromagnetic radiation, and all forms
of particle radiation. The recognition, evaluation, and
recommendations for control of biomedical hazards are the
responsibility of bioenvironmental engineering.
Not all chemicals are hazardous, not all radiation is harmful.
As Alice Ottoboni says, “The dose makes the poison.” All but
about 20 of the 92 natural elements are essential to life, yet
excessive amounts of any one of them will be toxic. Sound
and electromagnetic radiation in the proper amounts and frequencies
are pleasing to the ear and eye, or in other amounts
and frequencies can be discordant and unpleasant or
downright harmful. Being smart is knowing when to seek help
to evaluate potential hazards from chemical and physical
agents.
Each program officer and project officer is required to ensure
that potential biomedical problems are considered at the
earliest appropriate time in the acquisition cycle. This requires
two decisions of the program officers and project officers: (1)
is a chemical or physical agent a potential biomedical
problem?, and (2) when is the earliest appropriate time in the
acquisition cycle to address potential biomedical hazards?
While the statement of work is being written is the appropriate
time to consider what biomedical input will be required. The
necessary biomedical input, reflecting the hazard potential, will
vary widely from program to program. For example, a
software study involving no physical hardware may require no
biomedical input because there are no physical or chemical
agents involved. Whereas each statement of work for a major
hardware system to be utilized at an Air Force installation may
require the generation of an entire annex which documents
both known and potential biomedical hazards, the
development of new criteria for hazards for which there are no
consensus standards, and new formulation of a plan for
mitigating the effects through process change, engineering
and procedural controls, and personnel protective equipment,
etc.
Some systems are so large and complex that environmental
impacts, on both the working environment within the system
and on the community around the system, cannot be foreseen.
The development of the biomedical data becomes a major
tasks and has a major impact on the development of the
system. To avoid running up blind alleys, the biomedical data
must be made available early in the program to people
specifying and defining the system. There are many examples
to choose from to illustrate this point.
In the early days of propulsion system development, the
emphasis was on maximizing specific impulse. A quick look at
the periodic table of the elements reveals that the maximum
specific impulse can be obtained by burning hydrogen with
fluorine. When the system was built and test fired, the
hydrogen fluoride generated in the rocket exhaust was so toxic
and corrosive that this propellant combination cannot be used
on terrestrial systems. Had timely biomedical data been
provided, the system would never have left the drawing board.
Reporting. The reporting and documentation of biomedical
hazards is easy and straightforward when the hazards are
“routine,” such as the fuels and oxidizers that are in the
inventory and that are used in an ordinary way. However,
when the state of the art is advanced in materials, bonding
agents, familiar chemicals used in novel ways, new
applications of radiant energy, etc., it is time to seek
assistance from bioenvironmental engineering to determine
what biomedical data are required and to interpret the
information supplied.
Evaluations. Bioenvironmental engineers trained in industrial
hygiene and environmental engineering can draw upon the
resources of the Air Force Occupational and Environmental
Health Laboratory and other information resources, that reach
throughout the United States and the world, to assist in the
identification, evaluation, and control of biomedical hazards.
This vast network of resources has yielded timely and
cost-effective solutions to problems such as real-time
monitoring in the parts per billion and trillion range, exhaust
cloud modeling, laser footprint prediction, and sonic boom
measurements. Air Force policy is that no hazard is too great
to be controlled. However, time, money, and mission
constraints must be balanced, and this is where the
professional expertise of the bioenvironmental engineers,
when applied early in the acquisition cycle, pays big dividends
to system acquisition.
Highest priority should be given to controlling medical hazards
with engineering controls. This is often practical only when
identification of the biomedical hazard is made early in the
system definition