Occupational Safety for Panellists Involved in Dynamic Olfactometry: a Comparison of Available Risk Assessment Models

Abstract

Dynamic olfactometry is nowadays the most diffused technique to quantify odour emitted from industrial plants. The methodology, standardized by EN 13725:2003, involves human assessors, who are potentially exposed to hazardous pollutant present in odorous samples. A standardized method to evaluate the exposure risk for panellist during olfactometric analysis is not yet available. However, two different models to evaluate the occupation risk for panellists have been proposed within the scientific literature. Therefore, this paper reviews the available models and discusses their application to a real sample to estimate the occupation exposure risk for workers involved in olfactometric analyses. After a brief models’ description, these are both applied to a real odour sample, highlighting the differences between them and the most critical aspects of applying the suggested procedures for the toxicological assessment of the exposure risk for panellists. This discussion highlights that the absence of a unique standardised assessment method and uniform reference concentrations can lead to significant differences in toxicological evaluations. In addition, the presence of compounds for which no toxicity threshold is available can cause an underestimation of the minimum dilution value to be adopted to protect the health of panellists.