September 3, 2010
Category: Mental Health • OSHA • Occupational Health & Safety • Safety
Public Citizen, the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) and other worker advocates petitioned the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to issue a regulation limiting the number of hours worked by medical residents. The petitioners argue that the excessive hours expected by the employers (hospitals) of these physicians-in-training cause chronic sleep deprivation and stress, which contributes to motor vehicle crashes, depression and mood disorders, needlestick injuries and other health problems. Among the compelling evidence provided are studies demonstrating significantly diminished mental acuity for sleep-deprived medical residents at levels comparable to 0.05% blood alcohol levels. One cited study indicated:
"Reaction times were 7% slower (p<.001), commission of errors was 40% higher (p< 0.001), speed variability was 71% greater (p<0.001) in heavy-call residents compared to light-call resident physicians."*
The petitioners use anecdotes to illustrate how a working condition---in this case excessive hours on-the-job---has a latent effect on the worker once they've left the workplace.
"Almost every resident I know in that program [surgery] has fallen asleep at the wheel driving home from work. And many of them have been in car accidents."
Were injuries sustained in these car accident work-related? I would say so. I doubt though that many employers (including the administrators of these hospitals) label them work-related. [Current OSHA regulations also exempt them.**]
As Sid Wolfe, MD of Public Citizen's Health Research Group notes:
"The dangerously excessive number of hours resident physicians are currently allowed to work is a similarly toxic exposure that OSHA has the authority to regulate and reduce in order to protect these physicians from harm."
Read on »
Posted by Celeste Monforton at 10:28 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Public Health - General
When I first started to get interested in public health several years ago, I thought of it mostly as dealing with things like vaccines and handwashing. From one of my friends who enrolled in a Master of Public Health program, I learned that it actually covers a whole range of issues that affect the population's health and quality of life - things like workplace and highway safety and smoking cessation, in addition to control of infectious diseases.
The word "population" is key to understanding public health. Healthcare providers focus on individual patients; public health workers focus on entire populations. Of course, many healthcare providers participate in public health work, and when they do things like administer vaccinations they're helping promote the health of the population as well as of the individual patient.
To get a sense of public health's scope and impact, it's helpful to check out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Ten Great Public Health Achievements in the 20th Century. The accompanying articles on these achievements are specific to the US, but many of these improvements happened simultaneously in other countries that were able to devote sufficient resources to public health.
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Posted by Liz Borkowski at 10:03 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 2, 2010
Category: Scientific Integrity
Back in March of 2009, President Obama signed a memorandum that laid out six scientific integrity principles and gave the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy 120 days to "develop recommendations for Presidential action designed to guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch." My colleagues and I submitted comments and waited eagerly for OSTP to release the recommendations. By July 2010, though, the office had missed the original deadline by an entire year.
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology meets every two months, and a portion of the meeting is set aside for public comments, which can be delivered in person or electronically. At today's meeting, the in-person public comments were dominated by people expressing concern over the long delay in the scientific integrity guidelines; commenters included my colleague Susan Wood and Francesca Grifo of Union of Concerned Scientists (video here). After all the comments had been delivered, OSTP Director and PCAST Co-Chair John Holdren responded to their concerns with a date:
The particular plea that those recommendations be issued before the end of the year will certainly be met. I think it will be met with some considerable time to spare.
He assured the audience that although the official recommendations haven't been released, Obama's six scientific integrity principles have been in force. He also stated:
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Posted by Liz Borkowski at 5:54 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 1, 2010
Category: Obesity • Transportation
As we try to figure out how to curb an unhealthy increase in obesity, one of the factors under consideration is the built environment. Those who in live in places where few destinations are within walking/biking distance, public transit is limited, and the environment is unfriendly to pedestrians and cyclists may find it harder to get the recommended amount of physical activity. Studying the built environment's effect on obesity is challenging, though. People who live in pedestrian-friendly areas with good public transit may be more likely to get enough activity and less likely to be obese than their counterparts in car-dependent places, but that doesn't demonstrate causation. What if people who hate physical activity naturally gravitate toward auto-dependent areas, and walkers move to places where it's easy to get around on foot?
This is why I was excited to see a study by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and the RAND Corporation that takes advantage of a natural experiment to study causality (via Ryan Avent). It was published in the August 2010 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and the full text is available for free online.
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Posted by Liz Borkowski at 7:26 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 31, 2010
Category: Environmental Health • Mining • New Solutions: The Drawing Board • Occupational Health & Safety
New Solutions: The Drawing Board is a monthly feature produced by the journal New Solutions. Read more about it here.
By Anne Fischel and Lin Nelson
We write to you as teachers and researchers concerned about the environmental and occupational health hazards impacting communities living and working in mining sites across North America and the world.
Through our project, "No Borders: Communities Living and Working with Asarco," we have spent the last 5 years looking at those affected by and affecting the work of the Asarco corporation, one of the oldest and largest mining, smelting and refining companies in the U.S. While our work is based at the Evergreen State College, we are committed to reaching beyond academia and working with communities who face industrial pollution and irresponsible corporations.
As part of our project, we recently had the opportunity to join a labor solidarity group in order to visit striking miners and their families in Cananea, Mexico, 60 miles south of Tucson. Our aim was to obtain first-hand information about the three-year action against mine operator Grupo Mexico, as well as to lend support to an emerging solidarity effort.
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Posted by The Pump Handle at 10:56 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Occupational Health & Safety
by Elizabeth Grossman
The American Public Health Association's (APHA) Occupational Health & Safety Section has announced the winners of its 2010 Occupational Health & Safety Awards. In a year that has been marked by what David Michaels, Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health, has described as "a series of workplace tragedies" - among them the deaths of 29 miners at the Upper Big Branch Mine and 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico - noting both the honorees, and those in whose honor the awards are given, is a reminder of the enormous work, courage, and long history of efforts to ensure safety at work.
For their outstanding work to improve workers' health and safety rights and working conditions both in the U.S. and internationally, the 2010 awards recognize five individuals:
- Dr. Sherry Baron, coordinator for Occupational Health Disparities at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health;
- Tom O'Connor, Executive Director of the National Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH) Network and principal coordinator of the Protecting Workers Alliance;
- Stephen A. Mitchell, the current Health and Safety Representative for United Automobile Workers (UAW) Local Union 974, representing 5,500 workers at Caterpillar Inc. in the Peoria, IL area;
- Wally Reardon, a communications tower climber who has dedicated himself to improving safety practices and standards in his fast-growing and dangerous industry; and
- Dr. Jeong-ok Kong, an occupational health physician who has advocated on behalf of Korean auto and rail industry workers through the Korea Institute of Labor Safety and Health, (KILSH), and most recently for semiconductor industry cancer victims through the organization known as SHARPS (Supporters of Health And Rights of People in Semiconductor Industry).
Their work carries on that begun a century ago by Alice Hamilton, considered to be the founder of occupational health in the United States; by Lorin Kerr, who served for over forty years as a physician for the United Mine Workers and was instrumental in passage of the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969; and by Tony Mazzocchi, who was one of the most influential labor leaders in the field of occupational health and safety, founder of the Labor Party, and instrumental in enactment of the Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1970. It is in their honor that the APHA awards are given. The long history represented here is a reminder of the challenges and dedication involved in this work.
I was heartened to see Dr. Jeong-ok Kong's name among the honorees, because I've become familiar with her work while writing about occupational and environmental health issues in the electronics industry. I first met her at a meeting in Manila in 2008 and the impact of her work has grown steadily since then.
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Posted by The Pump Handle at 11:08 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 30, 2010
Category: Confined Space @ TPH • Occupational Health & Safety
Just in time for the Labor Day holiday, the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center (NORC) released a study indicating 85 percent of workers rank safety on the job as their top labor standard. NORC's report, Public Attitudes towards and Experiences with Workplace Safety, assembled the results of dozens polls and surveys to assess public opinion about US labor standards and practices, such as minimum wage, maternity leave, paid sick days and overtime pay. Of the 1,461 workers surveyed in 2010, 85% gave "workplace safety regulations" the top rank: very important. Despite this finding, the authors note that
"media coverage of workplace safety issues has been sporadic and evaluation of public attention to the issue even rarer."
A large majority of workers indicate that workplace safety is a priority for their management (90%), and compromises or shortcuts are not taken when workers safety is at stake (87%). That's the good news. The challenge and duty of our worker protection regulatory system is to identify and take action against those who do dismiss or ignore health and safety hazards and workers' concerns.
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Posted by Celeste Monforton at 11:42 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 27, 2010
Category: Mental Health
Scicurious at Neurotic Physiology is publishing a bunch of "Back to Basics" posts that are well worth a read, and I found her series on depression particularly interesting. In Depression: Part 1, Scicurious explains why we should care about this disease:
Right now, depression is thought to occur in 21% of women and 13% of men worldwide, with 18 million people affected in the US (this is according to the lecture I had in 2006 on it, though other people say it's 8-17% of the total population). It's a big deal for research, depression is second leading cause of disability, and antidepressants are the third best-selling group of pharmocotherapies in the world. Not only that, the economic burden is 12.4 billion dollars a year in medical, psychiatric, and pharmacological care, and that's not counting decreased productivity, work absences, and mortality costs for depression-related suicides (well, ok, it's not that much when compared to the cost of the Iraq war). Regardless of its issues in modern society, depression is both a significant emotional and economic burden, and something that goes very far back in human history.
That got me interested in finding out a bit more about disability caused by depression.
Read on »
Posted by Liz Borkowski at 8:00 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: OSHA • Occupational Health & Safety
A classic tool used in public relations is a news release. Companies and other organizations craft these statements to announce new products, activities or accomplishments. Well-written news releases offer the what, where, when, who and why, and are often used "as-is" in trade publications and other print media. A collection of an organization's news release might also reveal its state-of-mind, its priorities and focus. In a sense, a historical record of the issues the organization's leaders believed were deserving of (or needing) public attention.
My interest in news releases stems from an inquiry I received last week. A colleague asked me whether OSHA had changed significantly during the Obama Administration compared to the Bush/Chao era. I offered several anecdotes describing policy changes in the works. I would have felt more satisfied, however, had I been able to provide more concrete evidence. This exchange led me to think about OSHA's news releases as a source of "data" to examine the agency's focus during two very different Presidential Administrations. Specifically, I examined whether the topics addressed in OSHA's news releases issued during the term of the previous assistant secretary, Edwin Foulke, are substantially different from those issued by the current OSHA chief, David Michaels, PhD. Here's what I found:
Read on »
Posted by Celeste Monforton at 11:18 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Liz Borkowski is a Research Associate at the George Washington University School of Public Health's Department of Environmental and Occupational Health. She lives in Washington, DC and loves public transportation and pumpkin empanadas.
Celeste Monforton, DrPH, MPH is an Assistant Research Professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health's Department of Environmental and Occupational Health. She also spent a decade working for the US Department of Labor, served on the team investigating the Sago Mine Disaster for the state of West Virginia, and is currently on the state's team investigating the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster.
