May is Electrical Safety Month, which is a good time to remember that dozens of people across the world suffer injuries from electrical hazards every single day. Survivors of these incidents list a range of devastating symptoms, from burns and chronic pain to insomnia, muscle spasms, depression, and various other mental health issues. Many of the full effects of these injuries are still not fully understood.

Today on the podcast, we revisit a 2021 episode featuring three renowned doctors from the Chicago Electrical Trauma Rehabilitation Institute. They talk about what a powerful shock can do to the human body, the treatments available, and how our understanding of these injuries is still evolving.

Links:
Learn more about Electrical Safety Month resources and activities

See NFPA’s suite of electrical safety standards and resources

Learn more about the Chicago Electrical Trauma Rehabilitation Institute

Carbon monoxide is known as the silent killer, but it doesn’t have to kill you to have permanent consequences. There is growing evidence that long-term exposure to CO, at concentrations that are too small for a typical household alarm to detect, can have serious and permanent impacts on human health, including cognitive decline, neurological issues, organ damage, and other ailments that are often misdiagnosed as unrelated chronic diseases. Today on the podcast, we talk to Charon McNabb, the founder of the National Carbon Monoxide Awareness Association, about her own experiences with long-term CO exposure, what the public needs to know, and efforts underway to reduce this under-the-radar health hazard.

LINKS
Watch a Fire Protection Research Foundation Webinar about the latest carbon monoxide research

Learn more about the National Carbon Monoxide Awareness Association

As the weather in the Northern Hemisphere starts to shift to spring and construction season gears up, we revisist an episode from 2021 about the costly ongoing problem of fires in buildings under construction. In the United States, there's a fire in a building under construction or renovation every hour and a half, according to NFPA data. On this podcast, Angelo speaks with Kevin Carr (4:15), NFPA staff liaison to NFPA 241, Standard for Safeguarding Construction, Alteration, and Demolition Operations, to learn more about construction site fires and how to prevent them. Plus, a safety executive with a large Maryland-based construction company and the chair of the NFPA 241 technical committee weigh in on why they think NFPA 241 is underutilized and how that could change (22:24).

Links:

Read more about the latest edition of NFPA 241 and NFPA trainings related to construction site fire safety: https://www.nfpa.org/safetyfirst