The Health and Safety Program of the U.S Maritime Commission

Our plain-English summary of The Health and Safety Program of the U.S Maritime Commission, by P. Drinker (1943).

The study

• Author: P. Drinker
• Published: JAMA - Journal of the American Medical Association, Volume 121 No31. March 13th 1943
• Type of article: Journal article
• Our copy: from Johns-Manville's own medical library. The article is still under copyright, so we describe it here rather than post it.

In plain English

This 1943 article was a paper by Philip Drinker, a professor of industrial hygiene and health consultant to the U.S. Maritime Commission, read before a congress on industrial health in Chicago. It was not a research study. It described the health and safety program of the Maritime Commission and the U.S. Navy for contract shipyards, which were operated by private contractors and, the author said, employed about a million workers. The author reported that a survey of selected yards led to minimum health and safety standards, adopted at a Chicago conference on December 7 and 8. The hazards the author described were eye flash burns and foreign bodies, called among the most serious and frequent causes of lost time. The others were risk of lead poisoning when welding surfaces painted with red lead, paint spraying, dermatitis from chlorinated naphthalenes and phenols used to insulate Navy cables, and welding fumes in small spaces. The author proposed allowing only masks and respirators approved by the Bureau of Mines, and called pre-placement physical examinations necessary. The article as provided did not mention asbestos.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Descriptive report (a paper read at a congress) on a shipyard health and safety program; not a research study
• Who was studied: Workers, men and women, in U.S. contract shipyards (about a million workers). The yards were operated by private contractors under contracts from the Maritime Commission and the Navy, and did not include government navy yards. United States, early 1940s.
• Exposure: Shipyard hazards described: welding (eye flash burns, welding fumes), lead from welding red-lead-painted surfaces, paint spraying, and chlorinated naphthalenes and phenols used as cable insulation. Asbestos is not mentioned.
• Main results:
  • The author described eye flash burns and foreign bodies as among the most serious and most frequent causes of lost time.
  • Most yards had as little as 1 or 2 per cent of workers who had worked in shipyards before the war.
  • Chlorinated naphthalenes and phenols used to protect Navy cables could cause dermatitis, and such trouble had occurred in some contract yards.
  • Work in small spaces such as fore and after peaks and double bottoms required special ventilation to control welding fumes.
  • The program proposed allowing only masks and respirators with Bureau of Mines approval. The author stated that there had previously been no control of protective equipment quality in contract yards.
• The authors' conclusion: The author stated that the health and safety problems were comparatively simple but hard to carry out with mostly inexperienced workers. The author also stated that the program needed pre-placement and check-up physical examinations, with results used solely to help the workers.

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Industrial Hygiene, U.S. Maritime Commission, Respirator.

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