MFAG: Medical First Aid Guide for Dangerous Goods

The Medical First Aid Guide for Use in Accidents Involving Dangerous Goods is the shipboard medical reference invoked by the emergency procedures blocks of IMDG and IMSBC entries, giving treatment guidance for exposure to specific classes of hazardous cargo. It is published as part of the IMDG Code supplement and is carried alongside the ship’s other medical references.

The full article will cover its structure and how it is entered, since the point of use is a numbered table reference carried in the cargo’s own schedule rather than a search by substance name. It will cover the general and specific treatment tables, the sections on decontamination and on transport of the casualty, and the relationship to the ship’s medicine chest requirements.

It will also cover how the MFAG sits alongside the other emergency references: the Emergency Procedures for Ships Carrying Dangerous Goods for the response itself, radio medical advice, and the emergency procedures block in an individual IMSBC schedule, which appears only on Group B entries and is the route by which a solid bulk cargo reaches the guide at all.