September 11, 2002—The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) recently agreed to collaborate to develop new technologies for protecting emergency responders from injury and death in chemical, biological, and radiological events.
NIOSH’s National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory (NPPTL) and NETL plan to exchange information, leverage each others’ research capabilities and facilities, and undertake collaborative activities to help assess and test new respirators and other personal protective technologies. Such advanced technologies will be essential for protecting emergency responders in terrorist events and other catastrophes.
Possible areas of collaboration between NIOSH and NETL include:
- Use of computer modeling systems to help predict and prevent equipment failures in the field.
- Development of new instrumentation and sensors to provide emergency responders with real-time monitoring of toxic air contaminants at catastrophe sites.
- Creation of virtual reality systems and computer models to evaluate new sensor, detector, and respirator technologies; simulations and models could reduce the cost of designing and developing new respirator masks, filters, and other devices.
- Developing, certifying, and recommending personal protective equipment to be used by workers at DOE remediation sites.
