Health and Safety Books

I have to admit it - I know Kate. Then again, I also must admit that I know the streets and where Kate's inspiration and education comes from. She's had the best experience - the kind required to be an expert at scene safety.

This text isalmost the best it could possibly be. My only problem with it, is its coverage of patient restraint. That just happens to be one of MY specialties - oh, surprize. Apart from that, however, Kates "Streetsense" is the ultimate "bible" about how to survive the streets! I endorse her text 100%.

CharlyD. Miller, NREMT-P

While I agree with the statement that one can never be too careful regarding safety on an EMS call, no matter where it is, I also believe in the validity of Sigmund Freud's "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

If one was to follow this book to the letter, you would nearly have to slather war paint on your face every time you went on a night call!

There are definitely some gems of wisdom to be gained from the text, but take a lot of it with a grain of salt. It is more useful to the EMT or Paramedic with a few years experience and has a fair idea of what he's doing than to a green rookie. At the end of the day, there is no substitute for experience. (PS: dont read it before bed time, it'll give you nightmares!) :-)

Lewis makes the good point here that too often we fear the unlikely while remaining complacent about true dangers. Many, for instance, believe nuclear power plants impose great risks, ignoring the greater threat from automobiles. The public spends excessive money and time looking for ways to bury toxic waste, or eliminate possible carcinogens from food,while overlooking natural health risks. Regulations created to make us safer often have the opposite effect. Citizens should acquire a greater understanding of risk and how it influences our lives.

The book is divided into three sections. The first gives an overview of risk and the issues involved, the second examines the role risk plays in air travel, radiation and pollution, and the third gives the reader a small mathematics lesson in probability.

It should be made clear right from the start this is not the sort of book to curl up with by the fire. It is written to educate, not entertain. One can hear the scientist speaking through the writing, wringing his hands at out ignorance and disbelief. Unfortunately Lewis is likely preaching to the converted. Those who agree with him already may make up the bulk of his readership. Others will likely stop reading about twenty pages in.

An excellent book on the risks associated with modern technology. Looks at the risks of car and plane travel, food additives, nuclear power, and other controversial topics. Lots of interesting examples. Did you know, for example, that the US government measures incoming wine for radiation, and rejects it if it's not radioactive enough

Very comprehensive on this subject, generally good photography of filament conditions. The concepts within each section could be a little better organized tend to jump around a bit.

I would recommend this for either a newcomer of an experienced investigator in this field.

A very good book to understand the different failure modes when incandescent lightsource are used in a car, excellent pictures and examples, the procedures description are in use now, on the other hand a revision must be made to update with new lightsources used in the market; like HID (High Intensive Discharge) & the use of LED in traffic accidents, color pictures are neccesary to understand some failure modes, will be nice to add in the next edition.

This book takes a survey-like look at the state of vaccines at the beginning of the 21st century, with each chapter focusing on one disease and the vaccines available for it. Each chapter is short, from 3 - 10 pages in length, and covers the history and science of that illness, and the history and science of the vaccines for it. The history portions of each chapter includes the source of the illness, its affect on human history, how it spreads, its symptoms, and biology. The vaccine portion includes a famous trials, and the names of the individuals, scientists and patients involved in making the vaccine(s). Most of the major infectious diseases are covered, such as polio, smallpox, chickenpox, and whooping cough. There are few exclusions, these primarily being the more recent ones, like the vaccine against cervical cancer. Another nice feature of the book are the appendices, which cover the legal aspects of vaccine usage, and how vaccines are tested in clinical trials. Overall, the book is quite complete, and quite readable for anyone with some science background. The only thing missing is a comprehensive timeline of events.

Dr. Link gives an overview of the history of vaccination and immunization, and ethical issues raised by this. He also has a chapter devoted to known vaccine failures and worse; the best known was the Bundaberg disaster in Australia in the 1920s, involving a batch of bacteria-contaminated vaccine. There were also examples of polio vaccine that gave people polio, and hepatitis spread by smallpox vaccination.

He describes the diseases they prevent and what they did to people, since most of us have never known anyone who had some of them, and why people should or should not take the vaccine. He also debunks the vaccines-cause-autism thing, but does admit that the P component of the DPT vaccine does cause neurological damage in a small percentage of people who take it. This is well known in medical circles. There was considerable skepticism raised about the chicken pox vaccine; he saw no indication in giving it to healthy children, and I have to agree. There are also chapters about anthrax and smallpox vaccination and the problems that have arisen from them.

The back of the book has the suggested vaccine schedule; he also gives provisions for spreading them out should the parents wish to do so.

Some people may not agree with what he says, but he's old enough to have encountered many of the diseases nobody gets nowadays and that is his only agenda.

Did you know that over 133,000 people every year are injured by doors? How about the fact that over 400,000 people in the United States suffer injuries every year while relaxing or sleeping in bed? You can find out this, and other wonderful information, in Laura Lee's 100 Most Dangerous Things in Everyday Life and What You Can Do About Them. This is a book that straddles two worlds. Unfortunately, it has problems in each one, but it's still an interesting read. It's supposed to be a humor book. How do I know this? It says right on the back that the classification of this book is "humor." It also contains a lot of information about possible dangers in everyday life and how you can prevent yourself from becoming yet another statistic.

One of the problems with the book is humor. It's just not that funny. There are some humorous quips (I particularly liked the suggestion in the "money" section, where she says that you should get rid of all your cash immediately by sending it to her). I smiled a few times. Even some of the entries are slightly amusing (there's an entry for Finland because they have the highest accident rate in the western world). But as a humor book, it just doesn't really work that much.

The good thing is that the book is valuable in other ways, too. The idea of the book is not to induce general paranoia about everyday living. What, you're going to stay in bed? See the statistic above. No, the book is intended to lessen that paranoia.

"If you can look such deadly items as kitchen knives, bedding, vegetables and teddy bears in the face each day without fear, you should be able to stare down the much more statistically unlikely threats that now haunt our collective consciousness." pg. 9

Lee presents each item in a very interesting fashion, giving statistics about the number of injuries and/or deaths every year. She briefly describes each entry, then gives a quick wrap-up of things you can do to avoid these injuries. Sometimes the beginning of the "what you can do" section is humorous (for Finland, the first thing she says is that you could avoid going there, but then you'd miss out on a lot of beauty). However, she always does come back to some concrete suggestions, such as avoiding enjoying Finland's wonders while overindulging.

Even when the entry itself may seem odd ("cute guys?"), the information she presents is intriguing. In the "cute guys" section, she talks about how studies have shown how attractiveness can affect our perceptions, such as how 57 percent of male defendants who were considered "attractive" in rape cases were convicted, but 82 percent of those deemed "unattractive" were. The book was definitely worth reading for interesting factoids like this.

The problem is in the presentation of some of these facts. The comparisons she uses don't work when you actually think about them. Take this one, for instance. In the section on sewing, she recounts how more people are injured sewing then are injured while mountain-climbing. According to her, 4056 people are injured mountain-climbing while 7099 are injured sewing. What she doesn't take into account is the fact that, I would guess, there are many more people sewing than climbing mountains. Statistics like this should really be given as percentages rather than straight numbers. Of course, those percentages may not be available, which just means that the comparison shouldn't even be used. She does this constantly, though there are entries where percentages are used. What's worse, she uses these statistics and then states that you are statistically more likely to be injured doing the one activity over the other. That's simply not true with the information she's given us. If 100 mountain climbers are injured but there are only 500 mountain climbers, and 1000 sewers are injured but there are 30,000 of them, you wouldn't say that you're more likely to be injured sewing, would you? Just because 900 more people are injured sewing than climbing mountains? This statistical problem does not affect every entry, thankfully. At times, she just presents the stats and doesn't try to analyze them.

Even the ones that do have this problem contain good information on the potential hazards, including one that I had not only never known, but realized after I read it that I had been using it dangerously and thus have changed my habit. 100 Most Dangerous Things in Everyday Life is a very valuable book that can educate as well as make you rethink your irrational fear of other things, like plane crashes. It's an enjoyable, easy read that is well worth your time. Just give some of the statistics analysis (the statistics are fine by themselves) a hefty dose of salt. And don't expect to laugh uproariously.

David Roy

the book was very good . i was doing a research project on violence in our world . the book was very helpful . it really went into detail on what i needed. im only in seventh grade but i love to read books. the book was very helpful, i let my teacher read the book and she was very satisfied with the book.the project went on to the county and won 3rd place .im so glad i read the book.

This book is a manifesto in which a group of apparently highly knowledgeable UK professors say: "we believe that there is more to risk management than is currently acknowledged".

Quote:
The argument of this contribution is that, although [conventional way of doing things] is always likely to have a place in risk management, there is no reason why it should be the only available approach.

The very fact that appears to have triggered this publication was the (scientific society) rejection of some other previosuly published work on the grounds of "not being scientific enough".

The main idea of this book is that risk management is subject to uncertainties so high, that common "scientific" way of dealing with risks is not working. And their arguments are very convincing. The following two metaphors from the book will let you quickly catch it.

Conventional approach is compared with a thermostat. Once set to a desired temperature it uses feedback mechanisms to return to equilibrium.

The argued for approach is compared with a desk lamp, the one with two springs on it's sides. The lamp is always experienses heavy tensions from both springs, but as soon as they counterbalance each other, the lamp is not only keeping steady state, it also can be adjusted into any desired position with a fingertip touch.

Not just as simple as that, the authors offer a set of dimensions along which the taxonomy of risk management principles and procedures can be measured. There are seven such axes. Along each axis, the two diametrically opposed point of views are proposed and discussed in two or more chapters. This gives a good coverage of the entire spectrum.

The book was published in 1996, ten years back in time at the moment of this writing, but I doubt if there were some groundbreaking developments in the topic of risk management. This by the way is one of the other discussed traits of risk management: as it's not "normal" science, it has to deal with political and societal forces and those are very slow to change.

I came to this book from software development point of view, and although it discusses environmental hazards instead, it's highly philosophical and before I knew it, I ended up writing notes on the margins and underlining the entire paragraphs.

Why 4 stars, not 5 ? Two reasons.

First, there are articles that are worse than others (but frankly I can remember only one such article which really said nothing at all).

Second, and more important was the language. I'm sure the respectable English professors managed to write perfectly good English, but then, I must be not very good at perfectly good English.

Consider this quote:
Perceptions of systems tend towards a closure of the perceived explanatory structure in ways that reinforce supportive patterns of belief and, in particular, the belief that someone, even if not the particular actor is, or could be, in control.

Please, there must be a simpler way of saying the same thing. How about "people tend to believe that someone is in control" ? Bashing through complex language really distracts from following the otherwise excellent and mind-provoking discussion.

All in all, no matter which direction you arrived from, this book offers a very good interdisciplinary discussion of risk management in modern world.

El tema cubierto fortalece la parte de analisis quimico de los contaminantes en los sitios de trabajo. Desafortunadamente los temas de interés se manejan muy enunciativamente y se desarrolla poco en los protocolos detallados.

Used in a certification course for CPR and First-Aid Certification. A must have reference for the classroom. This edition is a little dated. Even after you receive certification it is a good idea to keep the book handy for emergencies or to refresh your memory.

I wrote the chapter on ionizing radiation in this book. I think it is quite good and would like constructive comments from professionals and students using the book.

It is likely to be ranked in the top 4-5 books on the general topic of industrial hygiene.