Caught a news item regarding a grandmother who died cleaning up the bathroom where her son had overdosed on a synthetic opioid. The son was found passed out and was rushed to the emergency room; mother went back home and decided to tidy up the scene - without donning protective gear. She apparently (coroners toxicology reports are not in yet) inhaled or absorbed enough of the opioid to cause serious breathing problems; she was rushed to the hospital and died there a day before her son finally passed.
One could think long and hard on the current drug epidemic in America; combined with suicide, we are now experiencing a decline in average lifespan - something that has not happened here before, save during the Civil War, for obvious reasons.
Given my profession - I provide commercial janitorial service to a wide variety of facilities in the Phoenix area, healthcare, office and industrial - another point that occurred to me in reading the article is the necessity of using protective gear in doing any cleaning. It's not just the chemicals that you don't want to inhale or splash into your eyes, it's the pathogens, chemicals and other substances that you're trying to remove from the office, lunchroom or restroom. You really want to remove all that stuff by, say, flushing it down the drain, not by imbibing.
We use latex gloves, safety glasses and surgical face masks as a matter of course. They are all cheap, easy to use, and on balance keeps our crew just a bit healthier than the average. (We don't do disaster clean-up, but have full bunny suits available, just in case.) I see a lot of my competitors janitorial closets, as well as closets utilized by firms who do the cleaning in-house. I pretty much never see any kind of protective gear at all.
Somebody out there is not thinking. Or doesn't care.
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