Risk assessment for handling hazardous substances within the European industry: Available methodologies and research streams.

After the Seveso disaster occurred more than 40 years ago, there has been an increasing awareness of the potential impacts that similar accident events can occur in a wide range of process establishments, where the handling and production of hazardous substances pose a real threat to society and the environment. In these industrial sites denominated "Seveso sites," the urgent need for an effective strategy emerged markedly to handle hazardous activities and to ensure safe conditions. Since then, the main challenging research issues have focused on how to prevent such accident events and how to mitigate their consequences leading to the development of many risk assessment methodologies. In recent years, researchers and practitioners have tried to provide useful overviews of the existing risk assessment methodologies proposing several reviews. However, these reviews are not exhaustive because they are either dated or focus only on one specific topic (e.g., liquefied natural gas, domino effect, etc.). This work aims to overcome the limitations of the current reviews by providing an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the risk assessment methodologies for handling hazardous substances within the European industry. In particular, we have focused on the current techniques for hazards and accident scenarios identification, as well as probability and consequence analyses for both onshore and offshore installations. Thus, we have identified the research streams that have characterized the activities of researchers and practitioners over the years, and we have then presented and discussed the different risk assessment methodologies available concerning the research stream that they belong to.

Weaving public health and safety nets to respond the COVID-19 pandemic.

How do governments take strategic actions in weaving public health and safety nets to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic? Embracing Moore's strategic action framework, this study investigates how municipal governments can configure authorizing environment-operational capacity-public value attributes to weave public health and safety nets, in order to prevent and control the public health and safety emergency. Leveraging fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) with a sample of 323 Chinese cities, we identify a distinctive taxonomy of four equally effective configurations of urban actions in blocking COVID-19 transmission: social reassurance, proactive defence, decisive resiliency, and strengthened coercion. Overall, this study provides a novel insight of public health and safety management into battles against COVID-19 in human society.

In the midst of the perfect storm: Swift public health actions needed in order to increase societal safety during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The phenomenal speed of COVID-19 has subjected the public health professionals worldwide to struggle to subdue the spread of the disease and its impact of the affected societies. The limited biomedical and epidemiological understanding of COVID-19 along with the lack of vaccines and therapeutics have led to the reception of draconian measures from the societal safety domain, limiting human interaction through social distancing. Grounded on the adopted approaches, interventions in sero-prevalence studies, mobilisation of the primary health care (PHC) sector, as well as target socially vulnerable groups should be taken into consideration by heath authorities.

Management of health and safety in micro companies in Cyprus: Results on ergonomic issues.

BACKGROUND: Ergonomics in Cyprus is a rather neglected area of safety. The size of the country, the lack of scientific expertise, the nature of the economy and the nature of the majority of the enterprises make it a case, different from the average. OBJECTIVE: The aims of the survey were to examine the views and perceptions of employees and owners/managers on safety issues of micro-firms in Cyprus, to collect information on accidents and other aspects of safety performance in micro-firms and to cross-check the above data with data collected from safety inspectors for the above firms. METHODS: The authors with the collaboration of the Department of Labour Inspection of the Republic of Cyprus collected information from a relatively large number of micro companies in a National survey. Information from employees, employers and labour inspectors was drawn. RESULTS: Particular emphasis is paid on the exploration of the relationship of the non-use of personal protection equipment with a number of factors. Results show the resistance of employees to the use of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) and GPM (General Protective Measures). CONCLUSIONS: The results of the survey are in line with the relevant literature. Micro firms illustrate several interesting findings that are discussed in detail in the paper.