Risks Associated With Wrestling

      There are many risks associated with the sport of wrestling. Day to day we encounter many hazards not only on the mat but off the mat as well. Most injuries occur during practice or in matches. Back in the day wrestling was even more dangerous due to the precautions that they did not take when cutting weight. It is very common in the sport of wrestling that competitors lose large amounts of weight in order to compete at a lower weight class. This used to be a problem because before there were regulations wrestlers used to lose to much weight and die of dehydration and heat stroke from sauna suits. Sauna suits are now banned in the sport of wrestling due to these unfortunate events. Also now it is required that all wrestlers must endure testing at the beginning of the season to prevent them from losing to much weight where it could harm your health. These tests consists of fat measuring and hydration tests which tells you the exact weight that that you are allowed to make each week throughout the season. If you do not make the certification then you are not able to wrestle at the lower weight. Also there are many injuries that wrestlers face during the season. It is very common for wrestlers to get concussions during the season. In order to prevent long term damage you are required to undergo concussion protocol and will not be able to compete until they are cleared by a trainer. The most common injury that wrestlers face is known as cauliflower ear. This is when the blood vessels break in your ear due to many hard hits to the ear. This is why most wrestlers have very deformed and ugly ears throughout their whole life. In order to solve this problem they are required to wear an ear protection device called head gear to protect their ears from filling up with blood and getting deformed. Due to the very physical moves in wrestling it is also very common for wrestlers to tear major ligaments in their knees. The more flexible a wrestler is the lower their chances of these injuries are. The most common of these knee injuries for wresters is a torn meniscus, followed closely by a torn ACL,MCL, and PCL.

The first picture is what cauliflower ear looks like after it fills up with blood.
The second picture shows a wrestler wearing headgear during a match to prevent cauliflower ear.

Occupational Exposure Limit (OEL,PEL,TLV)

       In the field of occupational hygiene there are many limits that have to be set in place to ensure the safety of employees in the workplace. These occupational exposure limits vary for different substances. These different substances that could harm your health could be gasses,vapors or aerosols which could be dust, fibers, smoke, etc. The limits OEL's or PEL's were set in place after the 1970 occupational safety and health act. Other standards that were adopted by OSHA  were the 1968 threshold limit values, also known as TLV's  which were put in place by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists. OSHA has set these limits based on 8 hour work days and 40 hour work weeks. These increments are calculated by the time weighted average or also referred to as TLV. OEL's are calculated as parts per million (ppm) and then converted to milligrams per cubic meter. These values could also be represented as ceiling values, short term exposure limits which are usually around 15 minutes of exposure, and IDLH which stands for immediately dangerous to life or health. Short term exposure limits (STEL) are limits where workers can be exposed for short intervals without suffering. The ceiling value is a concentration that should not be exceeded at any point during the workday and is represented with a C. This C comes after the substance listing.  There are many problems with OSHA's enforcement of PEL's and TLV's in the workplace due to the outdated limits that were set almost 43 years ago. OSHA tried to adopt new limits in 1989 but due to many complications they dropped the newly found limits and continued to use the old limits adopted in 1971. The people in charge of recommending occupational exposure limits now is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. This institute has recommended exposure levels for around 700 substances to this day.

OSHA
PEL and TLV

The first device has a pump and shows how much air is coming in and the second device is a cyclone and collects the contaminants in the air.

Dose and Response

       In the study of occupational hygiene there is a very important relationship between dose and response. It is actually one of the most important relationships when referring to toxicology. Dose is the time of exposure to a poison or toxic substance white the response is the effect that it has on the organism that was exposed to the toxin.In the field of occupational hygiene they determine the dose as the amount of the toxin that is absorbed by the organisms that were exposed to the poison. The dose response relationship doesn't always have to adhere to toxins and poisons but also can deal with drugs or chemicals. There comes a point in the relationship that too little of a dose and too much of a dose could effect you negatively. If there is too little of a dose then the expected response could not be met and if the dose is too much then the the response could be harmful and even fatal to the exposed organism.  in order to get the most effective dose and response relationship it is important to find what is known as the dose-response threshold. What you do to find this is a create a graph and find the point where the threshold is. This system is very useful in occupational hygiene because it helps establish what the correct doses appropriate to achieve the level of response desired. On the graph the dose is set on the x axis while the response is labeled on the right axis. In this graph you have to create a curve. You can also test this between different substances and create a graph with two separate curves and find the relationship between the two as well as their intended response. Another thing that is very important to the dose and response study is the susceptivity of the organism to the different substances. The organisms that are more susceptive to the chemical,toxin, or drug have a far worse response to the dose. If an organism is less susceptive to a chemical then it will take a higher dose to effect it the same as it would to effect a more susceptible organism.

References-Dose and Response

John Hopkins school of public health( industrial hygiene)

The raid and windex are both poisons. The raid is a poison that has a response to insects and the windex is a poison that negatively effects humans.