>Numbers for degree of hazard (using scales which are opposite for GHS and NFPA/HMIS)?

>And the writers of GHS had to know they were contradictory.  How about instead of 1 or 4

>you write "HIGHLY TOXIC".  How simple would that be?

It is all very well to say that a few words would work better than a coded number or letter system, and they would if you have only one language to deal with. But the people who put GHS together had to deal with the fact that it had to work not only for multiple languages, but also for multiple alphabets/character systems. What is instantly clear to an English language reader with "HIGHLY TOXIC" would be so much gobbledygook to an employee who only reads and understands Japanese, Korean or Arabic, for a few examples, and vice versa. I have had a devil of a time dealing with an MSDS in Japanese when an English version was not forthcoming. [Fortunately, my then employer had character recognition that could handle Japanese, sort of, and I could then feed to Google Translate on a block by block basis. Not the best result, but I felt I could extract the information I needed.]

The use of Indo-Arabic numerals is much more widely understood.

Peter Zavon, CIH
Penfield, NY

PZAVON**At_Symbol_Here**Rochester.rr.com