Vol. 3  Iss. 3  The Chemical Educator  © 1998 Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.

ISSN 1430-4171 http://journals.springer-ny.com /chedr S 1430-4171(98)03220-8

Quick Selection Guide to Chemical Protective Clothing by Krister Forsberg and S. Z. Mansdorf. Van Nostrand Reinhold: New York, 1998. 3rd ed. vi + 118 pp. $25.95. ISBN 0-442-02377-4.

The advice of chemical safety officers is often sought on the choice of gloves and other clothing to provide protection from hazardous chemicals. In view of the wide range of hazards that chemicals present, a comprehensive guide to the chemical resistance of clothing is essential reference material for any safety officer.

The Quick Selection Guide attempts to meet this need, and in some respects does so effectively. Most commonly, users are interested in the selection of protective gloves. The Guide includes all the main glove materials, with recommendations covering several hundred widely used chemicals, including the common inorganic and organic acids, chlorinated solvents, and other organics. The logical format of the book, divided into two tables ordered by chemical and functional group, ensures that one can rapidly locate the data one needs. The book is quite pricey, at $25.95 for just over 100 short pages, but its ring-bound format is both practical and hard-wearing.

However, the Guide does suffer from several drawbacks; the first is the questionable value of the "Risk Codes." Each chemical listed is given a Risk Code to indicate if the chemical is toxic, highly toxic, corrosive and so on. A blank space in the Risk Code column indicates "no significant risk under normal use conditions, or that the material is not listed."

The first two chemicals I checked in the guide were tetraethyllead and isoamyl nitrite. Both chemicals have a blank entry as their Risk Code. One might interpret this to mean that there is "no significant risk under normal use conditions" (it is not clear precisely what the authors mean by the alternative, that "the material is not listed"), yet isoamyl nitrite is an anesthetic that can cause cyanosis, and tetraethyllead is highly toxic (ORL-RAT LD50 12 mg/kg), may cause irreversible effects, may affect a fetus, and may be a mutagen. At least in my laboratory, this chemical would be categorized as very hazardous.

Isoamyl nitrite and tetraethyllead are neither exotic nor unusual chemicals, and safety information on them is readily available, both from manufacturers and through the Internet. That there should be no indication in the Guide of their risks casts doubt on the value of the Risk Code data (and, by implication, other data) that the book contains.

For a number of chemicals, no recommendations for protective clothing are given. This group includes isobutyl nitrite, trimethyl phosphate, bromine trifluoride, diethylbenzene, dimethoxane, allyl bromide, diethyl carbonate, 1-ethoxy-2-propanol, piperidine, and others. It is of some limited use to see listed the clothing materials that are not recommended for use with these chemicals, but it would have been far more helpful if the authors had been able to make a positive suggestion - or even state that no suitable protective material is known, if that is the case.

The most disconcerting feature of the Guide, though, appears as early as the first paragraph. Under the Important Instructions heading, the authors state: "NO attempt has been made to ensure either the accuracy or the precision of these compiled data," and later in the same paragraph: "All selections based on this guide MUST be reviewed by a person competent in the selection of chemical protective clothing" [Emphasis theirs] .

Since this guide is exactly the kind of resource that I, as a safety officer, would expect to consult when research workers need advice, it is worrying to be told that the authors have made no attempt to ensure that the information it contains is accurate. Unfortunately, the inadequacy of the information provided for tetraethyllead seems to justify the authors' caution.

There is, I am sure, much of value in this short guide. However, I shall continue to rely mainly on data provided by manufacturers of protective clothing until the authors can feel more confident of the veracity of the information they provide.