Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Molly Maar, spokeswoman for the Semiconductor Industry Association, says that the SIA "allocates approximately 15 percent of its annual budget to environmental, health and safety issues," although she declined to state what the SIA's annual budget is. Asked for examples of proactive measures taken by the industry to safeguard worker health, she cites the Occupational Health System, an "ongoing, management-sponsored approach to performing work injury and illness surveillance" operated by industry consultant Don Lassiter.
When pressed for specific examples of how this data has been used to improve worker health and safety, Maar says that the industry is "constantly sharing practices" and "making sure that everyone is up to speed on chemical alternatives" and that "every generation [of new equipment and practices] as we go into the future is going to be safer and safer. That's just the way the industry is going to be. Those things, as time goes on, are just going to be better and better."
A search through SIA press releases turns up an announcement from March 2001 that the association was doubling the size of its Focus Center Research Program, funneling half a billion dollars over a 10-year period to leading research universities "to ensure continued advancements in microelectronics technology." The industry provides 50 percent of the funding of this program, divided into four efforts with the following goals: materials to extend the life of planar-bulk CMOS silicon, circuit analysis and synthesis, application methodologies for future computing devices and interconnects between a microchip and the total system.
That's $250 million in industry funds funneled into targeted research and development. Maar says that the research into future chip materials takes "environment, health and safety concerns into significant consideration," but is unable to say how much money, if any, such consideration costs.
For more details on proactive health measures taken by the industry in the past two decades, Maar referred me to Lassiter.
Lassiter, a professor of public health at the University of Oklahoma, was hired by the SIA in 1982 to develop and administer an internal health and safety reporting system -- which, curiously, comes up with a consistently lower rate of occupational illness in the industry than indicated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A former health official at both the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Lassiter makes "no pretense that this [system], in any way, identifies chronic conditions ... It's not designed to do that. If those conditions exist -- there's no evidence they do -- but if they exist, then the system is certainly not capable of capturing those."
Lassiter is also unable to provide much in the way of specifics on the topic of workplace improvements. He cites general trends over the past two decades toward equipment automation and protective devices, resulting in "less potential for contact with chemicals," but with regard to the issue of worker safety he says, "I have less an opinion on stuff than I am just managing a database."
What about possible health hazards for clean-room workers as a result of contaminants in recirculated air?
"I'm not sure what people are talking about with recirculated air," he answers. "What you'd have to find out is how much the air really is recirculated, and if it is recirculated, what does that mean when you take air measurements? ... Even if you recirculate the air, I guess what they're saying is that the concentration of the chemicals increases."
Lassiter's critics disagree with his suggestion that their main problem with recirculated air is that it might increase the amount of chemicals ingested. What they're saying, and have been saying for 20 years, is that the air filters do not change the chemical makeup of vapors -- such as those escaping from the spilled disk coating Alida Hernandez describes -- and that these chemicals constitute low-level, long-term exposures that may accumulate in fatty tissue and have adverse chronic effects on worker health such as cancer. What they're also saying is that these chemicals, once metabolized by a worker, may react with other contaminants, creating new and untrackable pharmacological hazards.
Dr. Bruce Fowler, director of toxicology at the University of Maryland at College Park, explains it this way:
"Most commonly, what you see when you start mixing chemicals together is additivity -- it's like stacking blocks. But for some chemicals, you actually get a bigger bang than you would have expected when mixing two or more compounds. The literature of toxicology is replete with stories of potentiation [i.e, "bigger bangs"]. Sometimes you can have one chemical jack up the metabolizing system so that the toxification of the second chemical will actually be increased -- it's a very chemical-specific phenomenon. Who knows what would happen if you had five or six chemicals absorbed at the same time?"
"All of us vary in our susceptibility to chemicals," adds Fowler. "Some people say that [bigger bangs] are uncommon at low-level exposures, but then the question is, What's a low-level exposure? Low-level to whom? Is it a 35-year-old male? Is it a pregnant woman? Is it somebody who goes home every night and has a few drinks?"
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