Content-Type: text/html Hugh, I don’t mean to pick on you - not much, anyway - but "posing a risk to its membership"??? How did we get from "Honey, where's the Bactine?" to "Warning, Will Robinson! Danger! Aspergillus!" While I would support a session at the ARMA conference on botanical hazards in the workplace, I probably wouldn't go to it. I'd also support a session on why eating three double cheeseburgers a day was bad for you, but I wouldn't go to that one either; unless they were handing out free double cheeseburgers. The one on why you shouldn't test for natural gas leaks with a flaming torch would have to get along without me, too. I would go to the one about Here's Twelve Videos About Why Bathing Suits Shouldn't Be Made Out Of Crackers. I'd go twice. If ARMA announced that it was hiring an epidemiologist to produce scholarly booklets on why certain molds are bad for you, but also announced that it was raising the annual membership dues by $20 a year to pay for the chap, the resulting hue and cry would be deafening. Besides, from time to time one needs to remember that ARMA is not a union, it is an Association, not unlike the Jolly Brotherhood of Guys with Similarly Appointed Warts; and as such, while it may and does speak authoritatively, it does not speak with the sort of authority that compels. I'm sure ARMA would like to see all of us making $80,000 a year, but don't think they could make it a reality no matter how many statisticians, demographers and accountants they hired. And in any event, what would be the point? Everyone in the biz already knows that certain things are bad for you, or at least suspects that certain things are bad for you, and knowing that a certain flavor of aspergillus caused liver dysfunction in white rats in laboratories isn't going to make any difference because everyone's innate sense of the Icky is already sounding the alarm; it is, paraphrasing you, Nature's way of saying "Ewwww! Yuck!" or "Dammit; just look what I stepped in!" You don't seriously suppose that collecting mold samples in petri dishes is ever going to become standard operating procedure - at least not in Knowledge Management (KM: "[Winston] had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother" ... but that's another story) - and for that matter, why stop there? I can see it now: "On Wall Street today, brisk trading in Orkin propelled the Dow-Jones to the 15,000 mark". If one's only choices are a mycotoxin sammitch or vermin that can pole-vault, I'll take some cheese and yogurt and truffles with the sammitch, and we'll have a mold family reunion inside the Gastrointestinal Hilton; and I do not think I would be alone in that regard. I'm not wild about immobile fungi, but I REALLY don't like ambulatory spiders and snakes.... But of course, those are NOT the only choices. Knowledge Management is no more fraught with life-threatening scenarios than any other occupation, and as is the case in the others, common sense counts for something. More people died at Chappaquiddick than have died from exposure to records; and more blood will be shed by people cutting themselves on broken petri dishes than at the hands of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Mycotoxins. More Knowledge Managers have been injured by dropping boxes on their footies than have been harmed by exposure to uranium isotopes, and I would bet that at no nuclear power facility in the country will you find posted signs advising the employees to not fiddle with the radioactive material; nor will there be signs saying "Do not drop box on your foot" in the Knowledge Management Department. I will accept the suggestion that I alone will be laughing when that Australian moron who persists in antagonizing crocodiles and venomous adders finally gets his comeuppance, but it won't be true, and you know it; a whole lot of us will be delighted. And you see the connection: there are some things you just KNOW to not do. Don't drop the box on your foot; don't touch the uranium; don't stick your head in a crocodile's mouth; mold is icky. The Little Voice might whisper in the normal course of a day; but you have to concede that occasionally it just simply SHOUTS. It shouldn’t take a White paper from ARMA to get a person to listen to it. I am not a CRM, and unlikely to become one. If being able to determine which floor tiles contained asbestos was made a part of the curriculum, or if I was to be graded based on the neatness of my science project on "Penicillin: You Just THINK It's Your Friend!", then "unlikely" would give way to "fergit it". In spite of my little bit of poking at you, I do think that you have, however inadvertently, raised an extremely important issue. It is not, alas, the toxicity or ickitudinosity of various fungi, for that is a given; or should be. No, the excellent point which you have uncovered is that, since so many of us have had these unsavory experiences with real-time biology, we will no doubt have learned that our respective staffs are not to be blithely subjected to such vile working environments; that not only will we readily agree to requests for protective masks and gloves and clothing, but will in fact proactively insist on them; that we will not send our troops where we would not ourselves agree to go; that equipment - ladders, lifts, carts, etc. - which helps to ensure the health and well-being of our subordinates is every bit as important as the latest version of a database program or newest model of a scanner; and that we must at all times when an employee's health is at stake err on the side of caution, and not on expediency, frugality, or even on service to our respective organizations. Harry F. Paget >From: Hugh Smith <[log in to unmask]> >Reply-To: Records Management Program <[log in to unmask]> >To: [log in to unmask] >Subject: Has ARMA concerned itself with health risks to RMs? >Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 06:11:24 -0800 > >Based on comments from Diane and others on the List as well as some horror >stories sent via email, I was wondering.....Does ARMA put out educational >documents and guidelines on this type of risk to its members? Shouldn't >there be an annual seminar at ARMA International to discuss health risks, >to >discuss safety procedures, alert you to the different types of dangers that >exist? > >It would seem that a simple testing kit could be used to determine what we >are dealing with. A series of small petrie dishes touched to the various >types of suspect molds and mailed into a testing lab would do it. > >Also, I am surprized by the number of times I come across asbestos in old >warehouses and the RM and staff are unaware what it is. > >Is this kind of knowledge part of the CRM educational program? The >mycotoxins I have read about are life threatening. Many times allergic >reactions are natures way of saying ....DANGER! In two days of posts we are >learning that something that we were just curious about is posing a risk to >its membership. > ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com