ICESH

The International Center for Environment, Safety, and Health (ICESH) is designed as a resource for credible, accurate, and practical information in environmental protection; occupational and public safety; and occupational and environmental health. Although the Internet is flooded with an overabundance of information covering requirements and guidelines regarding each of these areas, ICESH's modular approach provides the user with rapid access to the necessary information.

While certain industrial facilities, universities, and other institutions have their own safety programs with varying degrees of sophistication, others have limited or no operational safety and health programs. Furthermore, smaller operations that deal with hazardous materials often do not comply with relevant regulations, due to the lack of access to substantive, credible, and easy to understand information.

At the international level, universities, healthcare facilities, factories, and many other operations in developing countries do not have access to credible information for the protection of their workers and the environment. The currently-available web sites are overwhelmingly developed by those who sell services or products. Even those that are developed by organizations, such as universities, often suffer from a key shortcoming: many web sites concentrate on compliance with U.S. regulations. What is being overlooked is the fact that:

l) there are underlying reasons for U.S. regulations; and 2) there are multiple approaches for accomplishing the same goals. Accordingly, an individual in a developing country does not need to follow the often expensive U.S. approach for reaching the same or nearly the same goal that was the objective of the U.S. regulatory agency.

ICESH attempts to respond to this need of the international community. A key feature of ICESH is reliance upon Best Available Science and Metrics for Evaluation of Scientific Claims (BAS/MESC). The BAS concept requires that all technical information must be subjected to independent peer review. Consequently, key information included in the ICESH web site has been subjected to Independent Peer Reviews (this document is in the form of a PDF; it is necessary to have Adobe Reader in order to view the document).