Publications

Researchers have the potential to be exposed to a wide variety of hazards inherent to the equipment they use and maintain. When equipment does not function as expected, researchers sometimes reach out to their vendors for assistance. Early diagnostic or troubleshooting interactions between researcher and vendor are often conducted over the telephone and can lead to researchers performing work outside of their area of expertise and exposure to unknown hazards. This type of interaction significantly contributed to an incident where during diagnostic activities a researcher accidentally contacted, and discharged, a capacitor in an X-ray diffraction instrument. While this incident did not produce a serious injury, if the capacitor discharge path had occurred hand-to-hand across the heart, a serious injury may have been possible.

Various laboratory-focused tools and methodologies for completing a safety risk assessment have been published, yet few similar resources to address chemical security exist.Herein, we describe a chemical security risk assessment case study at a university in a developing country.In this case study, we demonstrate a chemical security risk assessment for a university chemistry department, using an original inventory of 645 entries which was condensed to 295 chemicals after removing duplicates and erroneous entries.We then prioritized to highlight 83 chemicals of interest based on hazardous or dual-use properties that could lead to unacceptable consequences.We further refined to a list of 34 high-risk chemicals that required action, 48 chemicals that may need further justification and consideration for additional protection, and 1 chemical that did not need further consideration for additional protection.