Don't Let the Heat Take You Out

We are currently in the midst of the season where our work environments expose us to the significant risk of heat stress illness. Understanding how your body works can help you avoid serious work related injuries related to heat stress. Making heat relief products like cooling towels, vests, sweatbands and hard hat cooling accessories a part of your plan is crucial to help avoid these very serious heat related illnesses.

How Does Heat Affect Your Body?

The risk of occupational heat related illnesses or injuries occur when the environmental heat plus the body's metabolic heat is greater than the body's ability to cool off. Our bodies produce heat in four main metabolic ways: breathing, digestion, muscle exertion, and energy storage. We are fortunate enough to have a built-in function called thermoregulation that helps us maintain our body temperature through the act of perspiration. 

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What are the Risks?

When thermoregulation is challenged by physical exertion, combined with high ambient temperature, we can experience decreased productivity and mental acuity. Under prolonged or extreme situations, a worker may experience dehydration, heat stress and even heat exhaustion.  When combined with high humidity, the evaporative process related to sweating is further inhibited, making an already bad situation much worse. Without relief, these extreme conditions cause the heart to work harder to circulate blood more rapidly around the body in order to accelerate cooling. For people with pre-existing health conditions related to the heart or circulatory system, this can be extremely dangerous and even fatal. 

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How Do You Prevent it?

To prevent heat stress and illness, we should start by educating workers to recognize the symptoms and know how to prevent and protect themselves from heat stress.  They should have access to water and shaded areas, wear lighter and more breathable clothing, schedule arduous work during the cooler parts of the day, have regular with recovery breaks and wear personal protective equipment designed for cooling. These products range from very sophisticated phase change cooling vests to simple, but effective cooling towels, sweatbands and hard hat cooling accessories designed to keep the workers body temperature cooler while they work. 

Watch this Time Warner video on how their employees deal with the risks related to heat stress >