Monitoring criteria (another can of worms)

["Jim F. Herrold" <HERROLD@UWYO.EDU>]

I may be opening another can of worms, but here goes:

You may tell from my post last Friday that I am being asked to review (once
more) my tiny budget for (yet more) possible cuts. Film badges are the biggest
single expense I have, so I am looking for guidelines to justify honing the
program down a bit. A year ago I started off a lengthy discussion on TLD vs.
film and the question of "to badge or not to badge" on this network. Today I am
wondering:

Is there a general (probably unwritten) activity that a person in a typical
biomedical research lab has to be using before we even go through the
evaluation of whether they need a badge or not? (taking into account a
worse-case scenario for regular operations, despite training they have
received, but not worrying about accident scenarios) I have heard the guideline
that badging is not required if labs are using less than 1 mCi of I-125 or 2 
mCi of P-32. In that case, do you badge everybody in the lab or just those
working directly with or in the immediate vicinity of these isotopes? We also
have labs using millicurie amounts of Cr-51 and Se-75.

Has anybody else heard a similar guideline? How do other Universities decide
when to go to the trouble of evaluating whether individuals need monitoring?
What about whole body vs. ring badges? I don't have the time or resources to go
out and make individual evaluations, unless I have some accepted base level to
start from.

Thank you in advance to anyone who wants to take a stab at this one.

Jim F. Herrold, RSO         U    U W       W 	University of Wyoming
e-mail:	herrold@uwyo.edu    U    U W   W   W  	Environmental Health & Safety  
phone:	(307) 766-3277      U    U  W W W W   	312 Merica Hall  
fax:	(307) 766-2255      UUUUUU   W   W      Laramie, Wyoming 82071-3413
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