A COMPARISON OF PERFORMANCE OF 2 PERSONAL SAMPLING HEADS FOR COTTON DUST

Cotton dust sampling for monitoring worker exposure was traditionally performed by work area sampling, A change to an exposure limit based o n personal sampling has recently been agreed, The choice of sampling h ead for personal monitoring exposure was hampered by the use of two di fferent sampling heads in the major epidemiological studies of textile workers which had incorporated personal sampling techniques, The purp ose of this study was to compare the results of exposure measurements using these two sampling heads, This study has examined the performanc e of the two sampling heads, by performing dual sampling on cotton ope ratives during: normal working activities. Each operative included wor e two samplers randomly allocated to left or right side, A minimum of 200 minutes of sampling was accepted and the relative concentrations c alculated, The IOM total dust sampler produced repeatedly higher measu rements than the Manchester head, The ratio overall was 1.33 (95% C.I. 1.20-1.49). The performance was similar across three ranges of dust e xposure from low ( < 1 mg/m(3)-ratio 1.28), medium 1-3 mg/m(3)-ratio 1 .43) to high exposure(>3 mg/m(3)-ratio 1.24). The two heads give repro ducibly proportionate dust measurements with approximately 30% greater results obtained with the IOM total dust sampler. Either dust samplin g head could be used for worker monitoring and the results adjusted ac cordingly for reference to the Maximum Exposure Limit. (C) 1998 Britis h Occupational Hygiene Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.