Occupational health
egrossman | April 28, 2014Today is Workers Memorial Day. This post discusses one of the thousands of occupational fatalities that occur every year around the world.
On Sunday, April 20th, Shayne Daye, a 27-year old electrician and technician, died as a result of an injury sustained while working at Suncor’s Oil Sands site about 15 miles north of Fort McMurray, Alberta in western Canada. Suncor is one of Canada’s largest energy companies and credits itself as the first company to develop Canada’s oil sands. Company spokesperson Sneh Seetal said Daye – who’d worked for Suncor for seven years – was working on an…
cmonforton | March 26, 2014Yep. “We’re not stupid” was just one of the many memorable moments at last week’s public hearing on OSHA’s proposed rule on respirable crystalline silica. The remark came from epidemiologist Robert Park of CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). He was compelled to respond to a comment made by Tony Cox, a consultant retained by the American Chemistry Council.
Cox, who was expounding on the OSHA’s peer-reviewed risk assessment, asserted that the agency has not demonstrated a causal link between silica and lung disease at OSHA’s proposed permissible exposure limit…
kkrisberg | March 24, 2014Thanks to a unanimous vote of California’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board last Thursday, workers get to hold on to a robust chemical right-to-know rule that puts their health and safety first. The vote also means that California workers will reap the benefits of more meaningful right-to-know rules than those at the federal level.
“It’s a human right to know about the hazards of the work you’re doing,” said Dorothy Wigmore, occupational health specialist at Worksafe, a state-based organization dedicated to eliminating workplace hazards. “If employers don’t know about the…
cmonforton | March 17, 2014This week will mark the next big step in efforts to institute a federal regulation to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. Tuesday, March 18 will be the first of 14 days of testimony and debate about a proposed silica rule which was released in September 2013 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA). The “deadly dust” is associated with malignant and non-malignant respiratory diseases and other adverse health conditions. The hazard has been recognized for centuries, but the U.S. does not have a comprehensive rule on the books to protect the…
kkrisberg | March 12, 2014When President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) into law in 2011, it was described as the most sweeping reform of the nation’s food safety laws in nearly a century. Public health advocates hailed the law for shifting regulatory authority from reaction to prevention. What received less attention was a first-of-its-kind provision that protects workers who expose food safety lawbreakers.
The law’s whistleblower provision, also known as Section 402, amends the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to provide “protection to employees against retaliation by an entity engaged in…
egrossman | March 11, 2014“The United States is facing an industrial chemical safety crisis,” Chemical Safety Board Chairperson Rafael Moure-Eraso told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on March 6th. He spoke at hearing held to discuss President Obama’s August 2013 Executive Order on chemical facility safety, which Obama issued following the catastrophic incidents at the West, Texas fertilizer plant and Louisiana petrochemical facilities. In the wake of the Freedom Industries chemical release in West Virginia, improving the nation’s chemical safety has taken on a new urgency. Yet while the Senate…
egrossman | March 3, 2014“For us it’s personal,” said Jeannie Economos, Farmworker Association of Florida Pesticide Safety and Environmental Health Project Coordinator. “It’s a daily issue for us. Every day with a weaker protection standard is another day a worker is exposed to pesticides,” she said.
On February 20th , the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced proposed revisions to its Worker Protection Standard for agricultural pesticides, the first since the existing standard was established in 1992 – and the second proposed update to the standard since its introduction in 1974. EPA has called the…
kkrisberg | February 21, 2014Last weekend, construction worker Jose Perez stood up and spoke about life as a construction worker in one of then nation’s most prosperous cities. In front of him were hundreds of supporters who had gathered in downtown Austin, Texas, to call on a local developer to treat its workers better. Looming behind him was the new Gables Park Tower, an unfinished luxury apartment complex where construction workers have reported dangerous working conditions and frequent wage violations.
Austin’s Workers Defense Project, a worker-led nonprofit that helps low-income workers fight for better working…
egrossman | February 4, 2014The city of Anacortes – population about 16,000 – sits on shores of Fidalgo Island, the eastern-most island in the San Juan archipelago, the string of islands clustered off the northwest coast of Washington State. Located at the western end of Skagit County, known regionally for its agriculture, Anacortes’ petrochemical plants – Tesoro and Shell refineries and a chemical plant recently acquired by the Canadian company ChemTrade -- together make up the city’s largest single-industry employer. On a rainy January evening, smoke plumes from these plants that sit near the water’s edge merge with…
egrossman | January 31, 2014“Millions of Americans use antibacterial hand soap and body wash products. Although consumers generally view these products as effective tools to help prevent the spread of germs, there is currently no evidence that they are any more effective at preventing illness than washing with plain soap and water,” wrote the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in issuing a proposed rule last month. “Further, some data suggest that long-term exposure to certain active ingredients used in antibacterial products—for example, triclosan (liquid soaps) and triclocarban (bar soaps)—could pose health risks,…
cmonforton | January 28, 2014Several recent newspaper editorials have gotten under USDA’s skin. Editors at the Charlotte Observer, Raleigh News Observer, Bellingham (WA) Herald and Gaston (NC) Gazette are skeptical that the USDA’s plan to “modernize” the poultry slaughter inspection process is a wise move.
In “Fed's proposed shift in poultry rules troubling,” the Charlotte Observer’s editorial board wrote this on January 20:
“Warning horns should blast full force around the Obama administration approving a change in federal law to replace most federal inspectors on poultry processing lines with company workers who would…
cmonforton | January 20, 2014It was one of those weeks when two seemingly unrelated topics crossed my desk. Only later did it strike me that they were connected. Both involved toxic substances and what we know about their adverse health effects. One concerned the contaminated water supply in West Virginia. The other involved a commentary by attorney Steve Wodka about a newish revision to OSHA’s chemical right-to-know regulation.
The drinking water emergency in West Virginia---thousands of gallons of MCHM (methylcyclohexanemethanol) which flowed into the water supply--- has focused attention on the inadequacy of the key…
kkrisberg | January 17, 2014“There’s a lot we don’t know about preterm birth and we know even less about the disparities in those births.”
Those are words from Ondine von Ehrenstein, an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, who recently examined the links between occupational exposures and preterm birth rates among Hispanic women. Perhaps not surprisingly to those in the public health world, von Ehrenstein and her research colleagues did find that Hispanic women are at particular risk for preterm birth associated with certain occupational…
kkrisberg | December 20, 2013People who hold down more than one job not only experience an increased risk of injury at work, but while they’re not at work as well, according to a new study.
Published in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the study found that multiple job holders had a “significantly” higher injury rate per 100 workers for work- and nonwork-related injuries when compared to single job holders. The study, which was based on 1997-2011 data from the National Health Interview Survey, examined nearly 7,500 injury episodes reported during the 15-year study period, of which 802 were…
cmonforton | December 19, 2013Two economists, funded by right-wing, university-housed think tanks, recently submitted their views on OSHA's proposed rule to protect silica-exposed workers. Michael L. Marlow with George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, and Susan Dudley of George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center, describe OSHA's proposal as flawed, sloppy, weak and unsubstantiated. Funny, those are some of the terms I used to describe their analyses.
Marlow offers a litany of cockamamie reasons that OSHA should scrap its proposed rule. He says, for example, that OSHA needs to consider a wider set of…
egrossman | December 16, 2013“Too often nothing happens,” said John Podesta, Center for American Progress chair and founder, introducing the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Majority Committee report released on December 11th that details federal contractors’ repeat and serious occupational safety and wage violations. “Too often the government renews agreements with companies that have a long track record of putting their workers at risk while profiting from taxpayer dollars,” said Podesta in remarks at a Center for American Progress (CAP) event.
The report, commissioned by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), found…
kkrisberg | December 6, 2013There are few factors that shape a person’s health as strongly and predictably as income. And while enforcing wage and labor laws may at first seem outside the purview of public health agencies, Rajiv Bhatia adamantly disagrees. In fact, he says that public health may wield the most persuasive stick in town.
Bhatia is the director of environmental health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) and is behind an innovative policy change that uses the agency’s existing regulatory authority to prevent wage theft and support basic labor rights among restaurant workers. Begun in…
egrossman | November 26, 2013As Americans prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday and the White House gets ready for President Obama to pardon the National Thanksgiving Turkey in a Rose Garden ceremony on Wednesday November 27 that will “reflect upon the time-honored traditions of Thanksgiving,” let us take a moment to reflect upon the welfare of the men and women who process the millions of turkeys on their way to Thanksgiving dinners.
First, according to the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 220,000 people currently work in the poultry processing industry in the US, at an annual median wage…
egrossman | November 21, 2013At least 1.7 million US workers are exposed to respirable crystalline silica each year, this according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). These exposures occur in a variety of industries, among them construction, sandblasting, mining, masonry, stone and quarry work, and in the rapidly expanding method of oil and gas extraction known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking. This exposure can lead to silicosis, an irreversible, and sometimes fatal, lung disease that is only caused by inhaling respirable silica dust. Silica exposure also puts exposed workers at…
cmonforton | November 18, 2013This week will mark the 90-day point of the Labor Department submitting for White House review one of its top priority regulations to protect coal miners' health. It's a rule to prevent black lung disease. The director of the office that conducts those reviews, Howard Shelanski, promised earlier this year during his confirmation hearing that timely review of agencies' regulations would be a top priority. Mr. Shelanski said:
“I absolutely share the concern you just raised about timeliness. ...I recognized that EO 12866 establishes the initial 90 day review process, and it would be one of my…