Health and Safety: Wasting your time or saving your life?

On my drive into work this morning I listened to Five Live Breakfast Your Call which was on whether health and safety had gone too far.  The timing of the phone in was fitting as on the news tonight was a report on Tate Modern who have stopped visitors walking on an interactive exhibit of 100 million porcelain "sunflower seeds" for fear that it'll cause dust that visitors to breath in.

Now you would of thought that the Artist and the Tate would of assessed before hand the likely hold of the dust problem happening and looking into ways to avoid not allow visitors to interact with the installation.  Few years ago the Tate had another installation known as The Crack, in which a number of visitors fell into, this didn't result in the Tate altering how the visitors interacted, they assessed the risks and had people in place to warn of risks but didn't stop visitors interacting as they wishes.  

Why not let visitors make the choice for them self with the sunflower seeds.