@pdxcanna shared this in licensed news. The kicker to me is the real discussion about endotoxins. I talk to people about this all the time - especially with all the remediated/sanitized/irradiated weed out there. That weed has less micro bioburden - but the dead bodies are still full of endotoxins and pyrogens - and anyone who works in sterilization/aseptic knows that those are just as dangerous! They make people really sick.
And hell they contribute to employees having lost hours and days are work. And this report implies that they killed at least one worker so far.
We’ve all experienced people having allergic reactions to these materials. Most people tell me its terpenes, or pesticides… or mold. But could it also be endotoxin exposure? Sure does seem like it.
How are you planning around this? Are you already thinking about it?
I know I am - but I come from sterile manufacturing in pharma so I’ve been thinking about this professionally for decades.
Share your successes and failures. What have you done to change your engineering controls? Dust collection? Machines with contained dust isolators? Something else completely?
From some time in extraction, it seems that the acute and short-duration sneezing and red-eye events are allergies. Especially when working with a lot of dried material. Many employees don’t like specific strains but, they seem fine an hour after working with those strains. We can’t sell moldy flower, but we can extract at -40 , then distill, so the product is (relatively) clean. When preparing that biomass, some may not experience an allergic histamine-reaction but aren’t they are still inhaling a lot of mold? Also, the room surfaces get covered in kief and there are the casing to the trichomes that we don’t want in our lungs. Sure the trichome contents are pleasant but we put a lot of work into getting the contents and leaving the casing behind. Also, when there are seeds, again can’t sell that flower but we can extract it. This is where I’ve wondered if it has gotten pulled earlier than it got flushed. Flushed with stuff that will pass a regulation but can add up in the system of some frontline processors. Thank you for asking about some of the mitigation ideas. However, I can’t get specific about where I work.
May I ask you to expand on endotoxins? Specific ones, sources, variety, size range? Very important topic but the article seems to mostly describe the shop vac the company bought at home depot.
From that same article and a pretty good reference with additional references on endotoxins.
I was trained that pyrogens can be deadly - specifically because they cause fevers. And fevers can cause all kinds of other maladies. Endotoxins are pyrogens - so they can also cause fevers. Some of them also cause different kinds of respiratory distress (there are some references about that in the reference above).
When we extract and distill material that has a lot of microorganisms or bioburden in it - are we then concentrating down the endotoxins? We aren’t testing for them in any states at this point… but if we were in pharma and we were creating an inhalant we definitely would be. We would test for them as well if we were creating an oral solid dosage (edible/pill/something that gets swallowed).
But we don’t test for them. So do we even know if they are present or not? This wiki article has a lot of excellent references as well - specific to a single kind of endotoxin, but which expands into a discussion of detection, prevention, and removal.
We’re definitely not doing anything in the industry right now that would be removing these. At least I don’t think anyone is doing depyrogenation… I haven’t seen it anywhere anyway. Anyone?
I wonder if endotoxins can be found in concentrates… i also wonder if the individuals who are susceptible to them experience “dab sweats” because of it.