Medical Evaluation for Respirator Use-Updated Approaches.

Objective: Respirator medical evaluations are an important component of occupational health practice. Concepts and practices were established 25-50 years ago.

Method: We suggest analysis and discussion of three areas warranting update.

Effects of Added Emphasis and Pause in Audio Delivery of Health Information.

Health literacy is crucial to supporting good health and is a major national goal. Audio delivery of information is becoming more popular for informing oneself. In this study, we evaluate the effect of audio enhancements in the form of information emphasis and pauses with health texts of varying difficulty and we measure health information comprehension and retention.

Text and Audio Simplification: Human vs. ChatGPT.

Text and audio simplification to increase information comprehension are important in healthcare. With the introduction of ChatGPT, evaluation of its simplification performance is needed. We provide a systematic comparison of human and ChatGPT simplified texts using fourteen metrics indicative of text difficulty.

Health effects of filtering facepiece respirators: Research and clinical implications of comfort, thermal, skin, psychologic, and workplace effects.

Filtering facepiece respirators (FFR's) such as N95s have become widely used in appropriate settings for personal respiratory protection and are increasingly used beyond workplace settings. Concerns about possible adverse effects have appeared in many publications, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic led to much more widespread use. This paper synthesizes known effects based upon review of publications in PubMed since 1995, addressing effects other than pulmonary and cardiovascular (reviewed elsewhere).

Exposure frequency, intensity, and duration: What we know about work-related asthma risks for healthcare workers from cleaning and disinfection.

The objective of this review was to scope the current evidence base related to three exposure assessment concepts: frequency, intensity, and duration (latency) for cleaning and disinfection exposures in healthcare and subsequent work-related asthma risks. A search strategy was developed addressing intersections of four main concepts: (1) work-related asthma; (2) occupation (healthcare workers/nurses); (3) cleaning and disinfection; and (4) exposure. Three databases were searched: Embase, PubMed, and the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) database.

Audio delivery of health information: An NLP study of information difficulty and bias in listeners.

Health literacy is the ability to understand, process, and obtain health information and make suitable decisions about health care [3]. Traditionally, text has been the main medium for delivering health information. However, virtual assistants are gaining popularity in this digital era; and people increasingly rely on audio and smart speakers for health information.

Association of Childhood Respiratory Status with Adult Occupational Exposures in a Birth Cohort.

People with better early-life respiratory health may be more likely to work in occupations with high workplace exposures in adult life compared with people with poor respiratory health. This may manifest as a healthy worker effect bias, potentially confounding the analysis of environmental exposure studies. To evaluate associations between lung function in adolescence and occupational exposures at initial adult employment.

Health effects of filtering facepiece respirators: Systematic review of pulmonary and cardiovascular effects.

Filtering facepiece respirators (FFRs) were introduced to protect the wearer by removing small particles from inspired air. FFRs are now also used to reduce the spread of transmissible agents from the wearer and are worn outside traditional healthcare and other workplaces. The COVID-19 pandemic increased concerns about potential adverse effects on wearers.

Causal Inference Analysis for Poorly Soluble Low Toxicity Particles, Lung Function, and Malignancy.

Poorly soluble low toxicity particles such as carbon black and titanium dioxide have raised concern about possible nonmalignant and malignant pulmonary effects. This paper illustrates application of causal inference analysis to assessing these effects. A framework for analysis is created using directed acyclic graphs to define pathways from exposure to potential lung cancer or chronic airflow obstruction outcomes.

Psycholinguistic Markers of COVID-19 Conspiracy Tweets and Predictors of Tweet Dissemination.

The adoption of conspiracy theories about COVID-19 has been fairly widespread among the general public and associated with the rejection of self-protective behaviors. Despite their significance, however, a gap remains in our understanding of the underlying characteristics of messages used to disseminate COVID-19 conspiracies. We used the construct of resonance as a framework to examine a sample of more than 1.

Website Survey Method for Assessing Higher Education Employee Health and Safety Programs.

Objective: The higher education industry in the United States is large (almost four million employees and 19 million students) with diverse hazards.

Methods: We apply a novel health services research approach to systematically assess a sample of 55 institutional websites. The accessibility, content, and coverage of occupational health/safety program information were systematically coded for several domains (eg, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)-related, specific hazards, clinical, person-oriented, COVID-19, and coverage).

Informatics Approaches for Recognition, Management, and Prevention of Occupational Respiratory Disease.

Computer and information systems can improve occupational respiratory disease prevention and surveillance by providing efficient resources for patients, workers, clinicians, and public health practitioners. Advances include interlinking electronic health records, autocoding surveillance data, clinical decision support systems, and social media applications for acquiring and disseminating information. Obstacles to advances include inflexible hierarchical coding schemes, inadequate occupational health electronic health record systems, and inadequate public focus on occupational respiratory disease.

Respiratory protection for health care workers: A 2020 COVID-19 perspective.

As the US health care system began to respond to the coronavirus disease-2019 pandemic, demand for respiratory personal protective equipment (PPE) increased precipitously, as did the number of users. This commentary discusses ensuing deviations from accepted respiratory PPE program practices, which potentially increased risk to health care workers. Such lapses included omitting user training and fit testing, provision of unapproved devices, and application of devices in settings and ways for which they were not intended.

Insights from Twitter About Public Perceptions of Asthma, COPD, and Exposures.

Objective: The aim of this study was to analyze tweets concerning asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Methods: Approximately 40,000 tweets containing asthma or COPD were analyzed. Lexical analysis ranked terms and domains of interest, compared COPD with asthma tweets, evaluated co-occurrence of terms within tweets, and assessed differences by source (personal, institutional, or retweet).

Work-exacerbated Asthma.

Asthma is a very common disease in adults, including in those who work outside the home. Work-related asthma refers to asthma that is either caused by or worsened by something at work. It is very important to know whether someone has work-related asthma because there are specific ways to manage it.

Recommendations for a Clinical Decision Support System for Work-Related Asthma in Primary Care Settings.

Objective: The aim of this study was to describe a recommended clinical decision support (CDS) approach for work-related asthma for incorporation in electronic health records (EHRs) for primary care health care providers.

Methods: Subject matter experts convened by the American Thoracic Society reviewed available guidelines and published literature to develop specific recommendations.

Results: It is important to recognize possible work-related asthma among persons with new-onset or worsening asthma.

Arizona Hospital Discharge and Emergency Department Database: Implications for Occupational Health Surveillance.

Objectives: The objective of the project was to identify trends in emergency department visits and inpatient admissions for occupational injury and disease frequency and describe the financial impact from specific clinical groups known to have occupational risk factors.

Methods: Workers compensation cases among 19 million records in the Arizona statewide hospital discharge database (HDD) were assessed for seven clinical groups from 2008 to 2014, including back, cardiac, carpal tunnel syndrome, heat-related, psychiatric, pulmonary, and trauma.

Results: Cases with cardiac, psychiatric, and pulmonary diagnoses were both frequent and expensive.

Feasibility and Utility of Lexical Analysis for Occupational Health Text.

Objective: Assess feasibility and potential utility of natural language processing (NLP) for storing and analyzing occupational health data.

Methods: Basic NLP lexical analysis methods were applied to 89,000 Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) free text records. Steps included tokenization, term and co-occurrence counts, term annotation, and identifying exposure-health effect relationships.