V.A. Kaptsov1, A.V. Chirkin2

“ We believe that the point of view of this part of respirator specialists is incorrectly justified.
The fact that workers do not use their respirators in a polluted atmosphere in all cases, partly explains their low reliability as a means of preventing occupational diseases. This problem exists in Western countries, and it is not fully resolved. There are a number of reasons in the RF that make this problem more frequent and stronger. The respirators, issued to workers, often do not meet the working conditions for their (assigned) protection factors ”

“ However, the respirators’ PFs are not the indicators of the health status of workers. Western researchers have conducted dozens of studies of PFs in the workplace. The results show that workplaces’ PFs can be ten times lower than in laboratories. For this reason, laboratory results cannot be used to estimate workplace PFs [11,19,20] . Measurements in laboratory conditions revealed cases of lowering the protection factors for the negative pressure half masks (for example, to 5.5-5.7 [21] ) ”

“ The share of workplaces where workers are exposed to excessive exposure to harmful and / or dangerous production factors has increased significantly in the Russian Federation. This growth has made the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) an important way to protect the health of workers. ”

“ Employers should choose respirators, given the fact that the air supply to the mask significantly improves the protective properties of respirators (this reduces or eliminates the reduced pressure in the mask during inhalation) ; significant difference between workplace and laboratory performance. Also, the employers is obliged to ensure the timely replacement of gas filters, and fit testing of masks.
Materials and research methods. We looked for such articles in which there was information about: (1) about occupational morbidity of workers before and after starting to usage of the RPE ”

“ So we got 965 articles. Information on the effectiveness of respirators and on the health of workers (simultaneously) was in 47 articles; and such information (but less complete on the health of workers) was in 48 articles.
The case of complete and sustainable (for 6 years) elimination of occupational diseases of workers is described in one article. It happened when applying the supplied-air respirator. These SAR supplied conditioned air to the facepiece (if the air in the workplace was heavily polluted) ”

“ We believe that if respirators are obviously insufficiently effective, do not correspond to the working conditions in their assigned PFs, then it is unrealistic to require workers to continuously use such respirators ”

“ Scientific work of the institutes of labor protection of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (1960–1975) ; Occupational diseases of dust etiology (1967-1991) ; Radiation hygiene (2008-2016) ; Modern problems of science and education (2005-2016) ”