Professorial Lecturer Herman Gibb is the senior author of a significant paper on industrial workers’ exposure to hexavalent chromium, Cr(VI), that was recently published by the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. The study is an extension of earlier work led by Gibb and published in 2000 that formed the basis of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) 2006 Permissible Exposure Limit for Hexavalent Chromium and NIOSH’s 2013 Recommended Exposure Limit for Hexavalent Chromium.
Cr(VI) is usually produced by an industrial process, and it is known to cause cancer, according to OSHA. The issue of exposure to hexavalent chromium received a great deal of attention due to the 2000 film "Erin Brockovich," which was inspired by pollution discovered in the Mojave Desert town of Hinkley, California. When Dr. Gibb and his colleagues published their study in 2000, Erin Brockovich wrote to OSHA and stated that “With the Gibb et al. study, there is now more reason than ever to regulate hexavalent chromium in the workplace.”
Gibb's new study, “Extended Followup of a Cohort of Chromium Production Workers,” follows the workers who participated in the original study published in 2000 for 19 more years. Dr. Gibb’s co-authors are Dr. Peter Lees of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Jing Wang and Keri O’Leary of the Milken Institute School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
Gibb is also an expert on exposure to mercury, and he helped the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Health Organization develop a plan for globally monitoring the concentrations of mercury in the environment and human exposure to the toxic element. In October 2014, Dr. Gibb, at the invitation of the U.S. State Department, spoke to audiences in Peru and Bolivia on the health risks from mercury used in small scale gold mining.