Why is it necessary to rinse eyes for 15 minutes after getting a chemical in? Wouldn’t 1 minute be enough?
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Lab safety geek over here from a research background including working with zoonotic diseases, infectious diseases, and thus many dangerous chemicals too.
It’s not just your eyeball but the mucous membrane around it. Imagine these as a sponge that connect directly to your bloodstream. They are highly absorbent.
Now imagine a bright yellow sponge that has soaked up a dark food coloring or something (like your eye making contact with a dangerous chemical).
You can’t wring out or squeeze the sponge to help clean it faster (just like you can’t do this to your eyeball when you need to rinse it out). Instead, all you can do is run water over/through it until all the ink has flushed out.
Except with the sponge, worst case is it’s a little stained if you can’t rinse it all the way. With dangerous chemicals in your eye, even trace amounts of the chemical can cause not only permanent damage to your vision but, depending on the chemical, leech into your bloodstream and brain and cause other toxic, permanent damage elsewhere in your body/other organs.
Don’t rush something as vital as rinsing a dangerous chemical thoroughly out of your body.
ETA: don’t skimp on the eye protection. PPE is your last line of defense after other preventive measures like engineering and administrative controls. Use it wisely and you won’t ever have to rinse like your life depends on it 👌
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