Did you know that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) offers a pocket guide to chemical hazards? If you have a chemical spill at your workplace, this guide allows you to learn about the hazards of that chemical.

In particular, the guide provides NIOSH recommended exposure limits (REL), OSHA permissible exposure limits (PEL), immediately dangerous to life and health (IDLH) values, measurement methods, personal protection and sanitation recommendations, respiratory selection recommendations, exposure routes, symptoms, target organs, first aid information, and much, much more. The guide, in effect, provides Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) information for all chemicals tested by NIOSH.

The ability to identify a chemical's hazards quickly helps you determine the risks of exposure and how to clean up a spill (or whether you should tackle it yourself at all).

You can search the guide online, using a variety of search criteria, to identify a chemical, identify its hazards, or identify a chemical by entering potential hazards. The guide is organized into three main, searchable areas:

1. An index of chemical names, synonyms, and trade names;
2. An index of Chemical Abstracts Service Registry (CAS) numbers; and
3. An index of Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (RTECS) numbers.

The guide is available in print format, or can be downloaded from the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) website.

Did You Know? CDC, NIOSH, NIOSH pocket guide, Hazardous materials