Liz Borkowski
lborkowski
Posts by this author
January 18, 2013
by Kim Krisberg
"To know you participated in building something in your city — it's just an experience, you know?"
Those are words from Austin, Texas, native Christopher McDavid, 22, a graduate of the city's newly established Construction Career Center. During his time at the center, McDavid got…
January 17, 2013
Over the past few years, the incidence of Clostridium difficile infections has risen in the US, and 14,000 people have died from the persistent diarrhea this bacteria causes. Some patients who haven’t been cured by antibiotics have turned to “fecal transplants” – the introduction of a healthy…
January 16, 2013
By Sara Gorman
In the 1960s, a rapid rise in nuclear technologies aroused unexpected panic in the public. Despite repeated affirmations from the scientific community that these technologies were indeed safe, the public feared both long-term dangers to the environment as well as immediate…
January 14, 2013
by Kim Krisberg
Dr. Paul Demers says he frequently finds himself having to make the case for why studying workplace exposures to carcinogens is important. Oftentimes, he says, people believe such occupational dangers are a thing of the past.
"A lot of people are still developing cancer and dying…
January 11, 2013
by Kim Krisberg
Amidst discussions of new gun control measures, a study finds that adding new settings where people can bring concealed weapons could increase the risk of some crimes.
The study authors note that while that risk is pretty small, it's still a risk and one that policymakers should…
January 10, 2013
Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis has announced that she is resigning her position in the Obama administration. Chris Hamby of the Center for Public Integrity looks back at Solis's tenure at the Department of Labor:
Labor advocates credit her with restoring the department’s commitment to protecting…
January 9, 2013
By Rebecca Kreston
“Pneumocystis Pneumonia --- Los Angeles,” in the June 5, 1981 edition of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, was an economical seven paragraph clinical report cataloging five observed cases, accompanied by an explanatory editorial note on the rarity of this fungal…
January 7, 2013
by Kim Krisberg
It's often noted that immigrants to the United States experience a decline in health after adopting American lifestyle habits. However, a recent study has found that new immigrants might not be arriving in such good health after all.
Published in the December issue of Health Affairs…
January 4, 2013
While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from last year. This post was originally published on March 23, 2012.
By Celeste Monforton
Earlier this week, Lizzie Grossman reported here at The Pump Handle on revisions to OSHA’s Hazard Communication standard which align the agency’s 30 year old…
January 3, 2013
While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from last year. This post was originally published on May 8, 2012.
By Liz Borkowski
At Wonkblog, Brad Plumer highlights a new NBER paper that’s disappointing to those who hoped that distributing cleaner cookstoves in India and other countries would…
January 2, 2013
While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier last year. This post was originally published on March 6, 2012. The final rule on home health workers has not yet been published.
By Liz Borkowski
Back in December, the Department of Labor’s Wage & Hour Division published a proposed…
December 31, 2012
While we're on vacation, we're re-posting some of our past content. Kim Krisberg's series of posts on worker centers in Texas is well worth a second read (or a first read, or a third read ...):
Houston, we have a workers’ rights problem: Profile of a worker justice center in Texas’ biggest city…
December 28, 2012
In looking back at the year 2012, one of the most momentous occasions was the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act. Here are a few of our posts on the topic:
Broccoli, Coercion, and Severability: Three days of SCOTUS arguments on the Affordable Care Act: Liz summarized the legal issues…
December 27, 2012
While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on May 31, 2012.
By Celeste Monforton
The Obama Administration’s quest to appease business interests’ claims about burdensome and outdated regulations awoke a giant in the form of the…
December 26, 2012
While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on July 4, 2012.
By Liz Borkowski
While the adoption of the Declaration of Independence is the most important anniversary that the US celebrates on July 4th, this date is also the…
December 24, 2012
While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on April 12, 2012. The silica rule still has not come out.
By Celeste Monforton
More than 425 days—-that’s 14 months—-have passed since the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and…
December 21, 2012
The Center for Public Integrity's excellent Hard Labor series continues with two more stories about workers killed on the job. In "'They were not thinking of him as a human being,'" Jim Morris writes about Carlos Centeno, who died after suffering from burns to 80% of his body. Centeno had been…
December 20, 2012
Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio is still circulating (Afghanistan and Nigeria are the others), and its eradication efforts have just encountered a horrific setback: Over the course of 48 hours, gunmen shot and killed eight vaccination workers in and around Karachi and Peshawar.…
December 17, 2012
I'm sure we'll continue to see and hear more in the coming days about the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, and that our thoughts will stay with the families and neighbors mourning the 27 victims of our country's latest mass shooting.
It's important to remember that this shooting, while it may be…
December 14, 2012
by Kim Krisberg
Workers in Travis County, Texas, are celebrating what advocates are calling a landmark victory, after local leaders voted to ensure that economic incentive deals benefit both big business and workers.
In late November, Travis County commissioners approved a new living wage…
December 13, 2012
Celeste wrote earlier this year about a study by health J. Paul Leigh of University of California Davis (published in the Milbank Quarterly) that calculated the economic of work-related injuries and illnesses in the US: $250 billion in 2007 alone. Celeste and I requested that he return to the data…
December 11, 2012
Several of my favorite health policy bloggers have explained why raising the Medicare eligibility age is a terrible idea -- in short, it would save the federal government money, but increase spending overall (with states, employers, and existing Medicare beneficiaries all facing higher costs) and…
December 7, 2012
by Kim Krisberg
The collective experience of domestic workers — house cleaners, nannies and caregivers — often remains hidden from view. For all practical purposes, they work in regulation-free environments without the benefits of labor, wage and health protections or oversight. There are no HR…
December 7, 2012
A fire last month at the Tazreen Fashions Ltd. factory in Ashulia, Bangladesh killed 112 workers and injured many more. Now it's being reported that the fire department had refused to renew the factory's certification, and that only five of factory's eight floors were built illegally. The New York…
December 5, 2012
This is a bonus addition to a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. To read the three-part series, which explores the science of pain management as well as…
December 3, 2012
December 1 was World AIDS Day, and this year's theme is "Working Together for an AIDS-Free Generation." In the 2011 United Nations Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS, countries set ambitious goals to reach by 2015:
Reduce sexual transmission by 50%.
Reduce HIV transmission among people who…
November 30, 2012
This is the last in a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. This week's story looks at the role of public health in curbing the opioid abuse and overdose…
November 29, 2012
At the New York Times Well blog, Anahad O'Connor writes about a new study, published in the journal Obesity Surgery, is a caution against recent optimism about gastric bypass surgery's ability to combat Type 2 diabetes. David E. Arterburn and his coauthors conducted a retrospective cohort study of…
November 27, 2012
By David Ozonoff
Annual Reports from governmental bodies aren’t often significant, much less classic, public health documents. By design they are confined to summaries of an agency’s work over a year’s time and they often don’t even appear until two or more years later. Such was the case for the…
November 26, 2012
by Kim Krisberg
It's often said that hard work never hurt anybody. It's a cliché with which occupational health folks and thousands of injured workers would undoubtedly disagree. And while tragic and often preventable physical injuries may be the easiest to see and document, other work-related…