Safety is the state of being "safe" (from French French is a Romance language spoken as a first language by about 136 million people worldwide. Around 190 million people speak French as a second language, and an additional 200 million speak it as an acquired foreign language. French speaking communities are present in 57 countries and territories. Most native speakers of the language live in sauf), the condition of being protected against physical, social, spiritual, financial, political, emotional, occupational, psychological, educational or other types or consequences of failure, damage, error The word error has different meanings and usages relative to how it is conceptually applied. The concrete meaning of the Latin word error is "wandering" or "straying". To the contrary of an illusion, an error or a mistake can sometimes be dispelled through knowledge . However, some errors can occur even when individuals have, accidents An accident is a specific, unidentifiable, unexpected, unusual and unintended external action which occurs in a particular time and place, with no apparent and deliberate cause but with marked effects. It implies a generally negative outcome which may have been avoided or prevented had circumstances leading up to the accident been recognized, and, harm or any other event which could be considered non-desirable. This can take the form of being protected from the event or from exposure to something that causes health or economical losses. It can include protection of people or of possessions.

Meanings

There also are two slightly different meanings of safety. For example, home safety may indicate a building's ability to protect against external harm events (such as weather, home invasion, etc), or may indicate that its internal installations (such as appliances, stairs, etc) are safe (not dangerous or harmful) for its inhabitants.

Limitations

Safety can be limited in relation to some guarantee A surety or guarantee, in finance, is a promise by one party to assume responsibility for the debt obligation of a borrower if that borrower defaults. The person or company that provides this promise, is also known as a surety or guarantor or a standard of insurance In law and economics, insurance is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss. Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for payment. An insurer is a company selling the insurance; an insured or policyholder is the person or to the quality and unharmful function of an object or organization. It is used in order to ensure that the object or organization will do only what it is meant to do.

It is important to realize that safety is relative. Eliminating all risk Risk concerns the deviation of one or more results of one or more future events from their expected value. Technically, the value of those results may be positive or negative. However, general usage tends to focus only on potential harm that may arise from a future event, which may accrue either from incurring a cost or by failing to attain some, if even possible, would be extremely difficult and very expensive. A safe situation is one where risks of injury or property damage are low and manageable.

Types of safety

It is important to distinguish between products that meet standards, that are safe, and those that merely feel safe. The highway safety community uses these terms:

Normative safety

Normative safety is a term used to describe products or designs that meet applicable design standards.

Substantive safety

Substantive, or objective safety means that the real-world safety history is favorable, whether or not standards are met.

Perceived safety

Perceived, or subjective safety refers to the level of comfort of users. For example, traffic signals Traffic lights, which may also be known as stoplights, traffic lamps, traffic signals, stop-and-go lights[citation needed], robots or semaphore, are signaling devices positioned at road intersections, pedestrian crossings and other locations to control competing flows of traffic. Traffic lights have been installed in most cities around the world are perceived as safe, yet under some circumstances, they can increase traffic crashes A traffic collision is when a road vehicle collides with another vehicle, pedestrian, animal, road debris, or other geographical or architectural obstacle. Traffic collisions can result in injury, property damage, and death at an intersection. Traffic roundabouts A roundabout is a type of circular junction in which road traffic must travel in one direction around a central island. Signs usually direct traffic entering the circle to slow down and give the right of way to drivers already in the circle have a generally favorable safety record, yet often make drivers nervous.

Risks and responses

Safety is generally interpreted as implying a real and significant impact on risk of death, injury or damage to property. In response to perceived risks many interventions may be proposed with engineering responses and regulation being two of the most common.

Probably the most common individual response to perceived safety issues is insurance, which compensates for or provides restitution in the case of damage or loss.

System safety and reliability engineering

System safety The system safety concept calls for a risk management strategy based on identification, analysis of hazards and application of remedial controls using a systems-based approach. This is different from traditional safety strategies which rely on control of conditions and causes of an accident based either on the Epidemiological analysis or as a and reliability engineering Reliability engineering is an engineering field, that deals with the study of reliability: the ability of a system or component to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specified period of time. It is often reported as a probability is an engineering discipline. Continuous changes in technology, environmental regulation and public safety concerns make the analysis of complex safety-critical Risks of this sort are usually managed with the methods and tools of safety engineering. A life-critical system is designed to lose less than one life per billion hours of operation. Typical design methods include probabilistic risk assessment, a method that combines failure modes and effects analysis with fault tree analysis. Safety-critical systems more and more demanding.

A common fallacy, for example among electrical engineers regarding structure power systems, is that safety issues can be readily deduced. In fact, safety issues have been discovered one by one, over more than a century in the case mentioned, in the work of many thousands of practitioners, and cannot be deduced by a single individual over a few decades. A knowledge of the literature, the standards and custom in a field is a critical part of safety engineering. A combination of theory and track record of practices is involved, and track record indicates some of the areas of theory that are relevant. (In the USA, persons with a state license in Professional Engineering in Electrical Engineering are expected to be competent in this regard, the foregoing notwithstanding, but most electrical engineers have no need of the license for their work.)

Safety is often seen as one of a group of related disciplines: quality, reliability, availability, maintainability and safety. (Availability is sometimes not mentioned, on the principle that it is a simple function of reliability and maintainability.) These issues tend to determine the value of any work, and deficits in any of these areas are considered to result in a cost, beyond the cost of addressing the area in the first place; good management is then expected to minimize total cost.

Safety measures

Safety measures are activities and precautions taken to improve safety, i.e. reduce risk related to human health. Common safety measures include:

• Root cause analysis Root cause analysis is a class of problem solving methods aimed at identifying the root causes of problems or events. The practice of RCA is predicated on the belief that problems are best solved by attempting to correct or eliminate root causes, as opposed to merely addressing the immediately obvious symptoms. By directing corrective measures at to identify causes of a system failure and correct deficiencies.
• Visual examination for dangerous situations such as emergency exits blocked because they are being used as storage areas.
• Visual examination for flaws such as cracks, peeling, loose connections.
• Chemical analysis Analytical chemistry is the study of the separation, identification, and quantification of the chemical components of natural and artificial materials. Qualitative analysis gives an indication of the identity of the chemical species in the sample and quantitative analysis determines the amount of one or more of these components. The separation of
• X-ray analysis to see inside a sealed object such as a weld, a cement wall or an airplane outer skin.
• Destructive testing In destructive testing, tests are carried out to the specimen's failure, in order to understand a specimen's structural performance or material behaviour under different loads. These tests are generally much easier to carry out, yield more information, and are easier to interpret than nondestructive testing of samples
• Stress testing Stress testing is a form of testing that is used to determine the stability of a given system or entity. It involves testing beyond normal operational capacity, often to a breaking point, in order to observe the results. Stress testing may have a more specific meaning in certain industries, such as fatigue testing for materials subjects a person or product to stresses in excess of those the person or product is designed to handle, to determining the "breaking point".
• Safety margins/Safety factors. For instance, a product rated to never be required to handle more than 200 pounds might be designed to fail under at least 400 pounds, a safety factor of two. Higher numbers are used in more sensitive applications such as medical or transit safety.
• Implementation of standard protocols and procedures so that activities are conducted in a known way.
• Training The term training refers to the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and competencies as a result of the teaching of vocational or practical skills and knowledge that relate to specific useful competencies. It forms the core of apprenticeships and provides the backbone of content at institutes of technology . In addition to the basic training of employees, vendors, product users
• Instruction manuals An owner’s manual is an instructional book or booklet that is supplied with almost all technologically advanced consumer products such as vehicles, home appliances and computer peripherals. Information contained in the owner’s manual typically includes: explaining how to use a product or perform an activity
• Instructional videos demonstrating proper use of products
• Examination of activities by specialists to minimize physical stress or increase productivity
• Government regulation Regulation is "controlling human or societal behavior by rules or restrictions." Regulation can take many forms: legal restrictions promulgated by a government authority, self-regulation by an industry such as through a trade association, social regulation , co-regulation and market regulation. One can consider regulation as actions of so suppliers know what standards their product is expected to meet.
• Industry regulation Regulation is "controlling human or societal behavior by rules or restrictions." Regulation can take many forms: legal restrictions promulgated by a government authority, self-regulation by an industry such as through a trade association, social regulation , co-regulation and market regulation. One can consider regulation as actions of so suppliers know what level of quality is expected. Industry regulation is often imposed to avoid potential government regulation.
• Self-imposed regulation of various types.
• Statements of Ethics by industry organizations or an individual company so its employees know what is expected of them.
• Drug testing A drug test is a technical analysis of a biological specimen - for example urine, hair, blood, sweat, or oral fluid / saliva - to determine the presence or absence of specified parent drugs or their metabolites. Major uses of drug testing are to detect the presence of performance enhancing steroids in sport or for drugs prohibited by laws, such as of employees, etc.
• Physical examinations Physical examination or clinical examination is the process by which a doctor investigates the body of a patient for signs of disease. It generally follows the taking of the medical history — an account of the symptoms as experienced by the patient. Together with the medical history, the physical examination aids in determining the correct to determine whether a person has a physical condition that would create a problem.
• Periodic evaluations of employees, departments, etc.
• Geological surveys to determine whether land or water sources are polluted, how firm the ground is at a potential building site, etc.

Standards organizations

A number of standards organizations exist that promulgate safety standards. These may be voluntary organizations or government agencies.

United States

American National Standards Institute

A major American standards organization A standards organization, standards body, standards development organization or SDO is any entity whose primary activities are developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpreting, or otherwise maintaining standards that address the interests of a wide base of users outside the standards development organization is the American National Standards Institute The American National Standards Institute or ANSI [citation needed] is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organization also coordinates U.S. standards with international standards so that American (ANSI). Usually, members of a particular industry will voluntarily form a committee to study safety issues and propose standards. Those standards are then recommended to ANSI, which reviews and adopts them. Many government regulations require that products sold or used must comply with a particular ANSI standard.

Testing laboratories

Product safety testing, for the United States, is largely controlled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. In addition, workplace related products come under the jurisdiction of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration The United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration is an agency of the United States Department of Labor. It was created by Congress of the United States under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, signed by President Richard M. Nixon, on December 29, 1970. Its mission is to prevent work-related injuries, illnesses, and occupational (OSHA), which certifies independent testing companies as Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratories (NRTL), see [1].

Government agencies

Many government agencies set safety standards for matters under their jurisdiction, such as:

• the Food and Drug Administration The Food and Drug Administration is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, one of the United States federal executive departments, responsible for protecting and promoting public health through the regulation and supervision of food safety, tobacco products, dietary supplements, prescription and over-the-counter
• the Consumer Product Safety Commission
• the United States Environmental Protection Agency The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is an agency of the federal government of the United States charged to protect human health and the environment, by writing and enforcing regulations based on laws passed by Congress. The EPA was proposed by President Richard Nixon and began operation on December 2, 1970, when its establishment was passed

Other countries

Standards institutions

• British Standards Institution BSI Group, also known in its home market as the British Standards Institution , is a multinational business services provider whose principal activity is the production of standards and the supply of standards-related services
• Canadian Standards Association Established in 1919, the Canadian Standards Association is a not-for-profit association composed of representatives from government, industry, and consumer groups. Among the fifty seven different areas of specialization are climate change, business management and safety and performance standards, including those for electrical and electronic
• Deutsches Institut für Normung Deutsches Institut für Normung e.V. is the German national organization for standardization and is that country's ISO member body
• International Organization for Standardization The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO (pronounced /ˈaɪsoʊ/ EYE-soe), is an international-standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on 23 February 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary industrial and commercial standards. It has

Testing Laboratories

Many countries have national organizations that have accreditation to test and/or submit test reports for safety certification. These are typically referred to as a Notified or Competent Body.

See also

• Accident An accident is a specific, unidentifiable, unexpected, unusual and unintended external action which occurs in a particular time and place, with no apparent and deliberate cause but with marked effects. It implies a generally negative outcome which may have been avoided or prevented had circumstances leading up to the accident been recognized, and
• Aircraft An aircraft is a vehicle which is able to fly by being supported by the air, or in general, the atmosphere of a planet. An aircraft counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines
  • Air safety Air safety is a term encompassing the theory, investigation and categorization of flight failures, and the prevention of such failures through regulation, education and training. It can also be applied in the context of campaigns that inform the public as to the safety of air travel
  • Accidents and incidents in aviation An aviation accident is defined in the Convention on International Civil Aviation Annex 13 as an occurrence associated with the operation of an aircraft which takes place between the time any person boards the aircraft with the intention of flight and all such persons have disembarked, in which a person is fatally or seriously injured, the
  • List of aircraft accidents An aviation accident is defined in the Convention on International Civil Aviation Annex 13 as an occurrence associated with the operation of an aircraft which takes place between the time any person boards the aircraft with the intention of flight and all such persons have disembarked, in which a person is fatally or seriously injured, the
• Aisles: Safety and regulatory considerations An aisle is, in general, a space for walking with rows of seats on either side or with rows of seats on one side and a wall on the other. Aisles can be seen in airplanes, certain types of buildings such as churches, Cathedrals, synagogues, meeting halls, parliaments and legislatures, courtrooms, theatres, and in certain types of passenger vehicles
• Arc Flash An arc flash is a type of electrical explosion that results from a low impedance connection to ground or another voltage phase in an electrical system
• Safety in Australia In common with most of Europe and North America, Australian state parliaments have responded to the problem of workplace illness, injury and death by enacting statutory standards regulating certain workplace hazards
• Automobile An automobile, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor. Most definitions of the term specify that automobiles are designed to run primarily on roads, to have seating for one to eight people, to typically have four wheels, and to be constructed principally for the
  • Car accident A traffic collision is when a road vehicle collides with another vehicle, pedestrian, animal, road debris, or other geographical or architectural obstacle. Traffic collisions can result in injury, property damage, and death
  • Automobile safety Automobile safety is the study and practice of vehicle design, construction, and equipment to minimize the occurrence and consequences of automobile accidents
  • Traffic safety Road safety aims to reduce the harm resulting from motor vehicle collisions. Harm from road traffic crashes is greater than that from all other transportation modes (air, sea, space, off-terrain, etc.) combined.[citation needed]
• Bicycle A bicycle, also known as a bike, pushbike or cycle, is a pedal-driven, human-powered, single-track vehicle, having two wheels attached to a frame, one behind the other. A person who rides a bicycle is called a cyclist or a bicyclist
  • Bicycle safety Bicycle safety is the use of practices designed to reduce risk associated with cycling. Some of this subject matter is hotly debated: for example, the discussions as to whether bicycle helmets or cyclepaths really deliver improved safety. The merits of bicycle lighting are less controversial
• Boat A boat is a watercraft of modest size designed to float or plane, to provide passage across water. Usually this water will be inland or in protected coastal areas. However, boats such as the whaleboat were designed to be operated from a ship in an offshore environment. In naval terms, a boat is something small enough to be carried aboard another
  • Boat safety Boating is the leisurely activity of travelling by boat, or the recreational use of a boat whether power boats, sail boats, or yachts , focused on the travel itself, as well as sports activities, such as fishing or waterskiing. It is a popular activity, and there are millions of boaters worldwide
• Child Biologically, a child is generally a human between the stages of birth and puberty. The legal definition[by whom?] of "child" generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority. "Child" may also describe a relationship with a parent or authority figure, or signify group membership in a
  • Child safety seat Child safety seats are seats designed specifically to protect children from injury or death during collisions. Automobile manufacturers may integrate child safety seats directly into their vehicle's design. Most commonly, these seats are purchased and installed by consumers. Many regions require children defined by age, weight, and/or height to
  • Toy safety Toy safety is the practice of ensuring that toys, especially those made for children, are safe, usually through the application of set safety standards. In many countries, commercial toys must be able to pass safety tests in order to be sold. In the U.S., some toys must meet national standards, while other toys may not have to meet a defined
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