[From bolts to the re-writing of infrasound]

[Autom. eng. transl.] The most long-lived will perhaps remember, with a hint of nostalgia as is appropriate for all the things on which the dust of time has settled, the perplexity that seized us when, as students or new specialists in occupational medicine, scrolling through the table of occupational diseases , under the heading "noise", we came across a rather unlikely process, the "bolt rewriting". In those years of the First Republic, confidence in the law was so great that no one thought of a misprint, re-typing by clinching. The idea that an error had fallen on the Official Gazette and, consequently, on prevention, appeared blasphemous. But why, we wondered, were these blessed workers starting to retaliate? Isn't all the industrial noise there enough? (and then there was a lot!) Well, you understand! Other times! But not so far from the logic that has always entrusted in our country, the drafting of mandatory rules on health and safety at work to committees composed of members who do not belong to the academy, nor to the practice of surveillance, nor to supervision , but they are sufficiently introduced in that strange world of the Permanent Commissions. After those legendary bolts, there were endless examples of this bizarre legislation, which does not originate from the real problems of the world of work, much less from scientific research, but from unattainable sources to the most mysterious ones. An example is the collection of data pursuant to Article 40 of Legislative Decree 81/08, which we have already dealt with in the past (3) to report the inconsistencies of the procedure proposed by the Commission (2) and invoke a careful and thorough reflection. After all the competent doctors were subjected to a frantic and useless data collection in March 2009, under the phantasmagorical threat of an administrative fine of € 10,500.00 and using a bizarre model that would have rendered the data provided completely useless, such as indeed it was. Two years have passed since that fruitless experience. Many things have changed. In the world, peoples have sustained one of the most serious economic crises to be remembered, the first of global significance. But nothing has touched the imperturbable members of the Commission, who today re-propose a model that retains all the defects of the previous one (4). Workers undergoing health surveillance are divided into twenty categories, so far nothing wrong. But what was the criterion that inspired the choice of these twenty categories, given that they correspond neither to specific laws nor to precise definitions? We note that all workers exposed to the several thousand dangerous chemical agents present in the workplace will have to be classified in a single box. On the contrary, high detail is expected for physical agents. The anonymous authors of the survey tool ask to indicate, distinguishing them by sex, the number of workers exposed to electromagnetic fields, to natural ultraviolet radiations (to artificial ones obviously one can expose themselves without risks), to artificial optical radiations, to hand-arm vibrations and whole body, with biomechanical overload of the upper limbs, with manual handling of loads, noise, ultrasounds, infrasounds. The infrasounds! How many Italian workers will be under surveillance for professional infrasound risk? Fifteen? Twenty-five? And how many of these are males, and how many females? To answer this interesting question, perhaps it would have been enough to consult the data that all of us competent doctors have provided two years ago. But in case someone has changed in the meantime risk profile or occupation, we are all ready again to a new census. Just a shame that the authors of the card have forgotten, between