Liz Borkowski
lborkowski
Posts by this author
September 25, 2012
If you haven't heard it already, This American Life's "Back to School" episode is a riveting examination of how children's environments and early learning affect their adult health and achievement prospects. Here's the Act One summary from the show's website:
[Host Ira Glass] talks with Paul Tough…
September 21, 2012
by Kim Krisberg
It really is a chemical world, which is bad news for people with asthma.
According to a recent report released in August, at this very moment from where I write, I'm fairly surrounded by objects and materials that contain chemicals that are known or suspected asthmagens — substances…
September 20, 2012
Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the preliminary results of the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries: 4,609 fatal work injuries were recorded in 2011, down from 4,690 in 2010 (note that the 2010 number is the revised final total, though, while the 2011 figure is preliminary). This…
September 19, 2012
The New York Times has a terrific graphic that plots the number of auto fatalities per 100,000 people and the vehicle miles driven per capita from 1950 to 2011. Overall, we're driving far more vehicle-miles per capita and seeing far fewer auto deaths than we were six decades ago, but this hasn't…
September 18, 2012
By Sara Gorman
Recent biomedical advances in AIDS research have allowed political figures such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to proclaim that the phenomenon of a generation without HIV/AIDS is within reach. But how well-founded is this optimism? A recent editorial in The New England Journal…
September 14, 2012
by Kim Krisberg
Funny cats and disaster preparedness. It's a marriage made in Internet heaven.
"Cats are all over the Internet," says Michele Late, coordinator of the American Public Health Association's (APHA) Cat Preparedness Photo Contest. "And if cats are what people want, then marrying them…
September 13, 2012
by Elizabeth Grossman
“Organic, schmorganic,” wrote New York Times foreign editor and International Herald Tribune editor-at-large Roger Cohen, summing up his “takeaway” from the study by Stanford University researchers that examined studies comparing the nutritional value and pesticide residues in…
September 10, 2012
Both houses of California's legislature have now passed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights (AB 889), which extends the rights to overtime pay and rest and meal breaks to domestic employees such as nannies and housekeepers. If Governor Jerry Brown signs the bill into law, California will become the…
September 7, 2012
by Kim Krisberg
Another study, another support beam in the argument that access to insurance coverage matters — a lot.
In a study published this month in the journal Health Affairs, researchers took a look at rates of amenable mortality deaths — in other words, deaths that shouldn't happen in the…
September 5, 2012
By Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
The Journal of Public Health policy has just published my editorial “The CIA’s Vaccination Ruse” on an open-access basis on the journal’s website. The editorial deals with the CIA’s use of a sham vaccination program as a cover for spying operations in Pakistan. As I have…
September 4, 2012
In honor of (US) Labor Day, Celeste Monforton and I have started what we intend to be a new Labor Day tradition: publication of a report that highlights some of the important research and activities in occupational health in the US over the past year. The Year in U.S. Occupational Health &…
August 31, 2012
by Kim Krisberg
It's Tuesday evening and as usual, the small parking lot outside the Workers Defense Project on Austin's eastside is packed. The dusty lot is strewn with cars and pick-up trucks parked wherever they can fit and get in off the road. I've arrived well before the night's activities…
August 30, 2012
A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: The 'NIH Superbug': This is Happening Every Day
Kevin O'Hanlon at the Center for Public Integrity: Privatization fails: Nebraska tries again to reform child welfare
Tara C. Smith at Aetiology: Obstetric fistula as a neglected…
August 29, 2012
by Elizabeth Grossman
What industry employs approximately 20 million Americans, or one out of five US private-sector workers, but whose median wage has workers taking home less than $20,000 a year? Clue: It’s the same industry in which it’s actually legal to pay $2.13 an hour, for workers who…
'An issue that affects all of us': Young workers center takes on wage theft in the Rio Grande Valley
August 27, 2012
by Kim Krisberg
For six months, Jorge Rubio worked at a local chain of tortilla bakeries and taquerias in the cities of Brownsville and San Benito, both in the very southern tip of Texas. Rubio, 42, prepared the food, cleaned equipment, served customers. Eventually, he decided to quit after being…
August 24, 2012
The extent to which the Affordable Care Act succeeds in making affordable health insurance more widely available depends to a great degree on the success of the state-based health insurance exchanges that are currently being developed. A piece by Ewout van Ginneken and Katherine Schwartz in the…
August 23, 2012
North Carolina's News & Observer has published a terrific in-depth series on “ghost policies” – inadequate workers’ compensation policies that save employers money but leave injured workers without the safety net they’re supposed to have. North Carolina requires employers with three or more…
August 21, 2012
by Beth Spence
Last week a friend and I visited the memorial dedicated to the miners who were killed in the 2010 Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine disaster. The massive 48-foot granite structure with 29 ghostly silhouettes is a powerful tribute to the lost miners and to the industry that has been so…
August 20, 2012
Recent investigative reports in the New York Times and Washington Post delve into some of the profit-maximizing practices among healthcare providers that are can put patients' lives at risk. Polls have found that people have high levels of trust in their doctors, but these pieces show how financial…
August 17, 2012
by Kim Krisberg
For years, Peter Rosenfeld was looking for an effective way to treat what doctors had diagnosed as severe and intractable migraines. He'd heard of medical marijuana, but thought it was a joke — that it was just a way for people to justify their marijuana use.
Then in 2000, the New…
August 16, 2012
We've written recently about two bills that had been passed by US and Massachusetts legislatures but not yet signed, so I wanted to close the loop and report that both are now law.
On August 6, President Obama signed into law the "Honoring America's Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families…
August 16, 2012
A new Health Wonk Review compiled by Jaan Sidorov is now up at Disease Management Care Blog. It's got links and descriptions for a bounty of blog posts on healthcare quality, the Affordable Care Act, Paul Ryan, and other healthcare topics (including a link to my recent post on where Medicaid…
August 13, 2012
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s selection of Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) as his running mate this past weekend has provided plenty of fodder for discussions about the role of the US government. Unlike Romney, who has often declined to provide specifics about…
August 10, 2012
In order to meet the healthcare needs of populations at the local, national, and global levels, we're going to need to think carefully about which providers can do which kinds of tasks. Pieces in Washington Post and New York Times blogs this week highlight projects that reconsider what kinds of…
August 9, 2012
Millions of people will gain insurance under the Affordable Care Act, but will they be able to get appointments with healthcare providers? Coverage doesn't automatically translate into access, and some newly insured individuals will struggle to find physician practices that will take them on as…
August 6, 2012
We've written before (see here and here) about Sheri Sangji, a 23-year-old laboratory worker who died from burns she suffered when one of the chemicals she was using caught fire. She was working unsupervised and without protective clothing in a UCLA chemistry lab, using tert-Butyllithium solution,…
August 3, 2012
by Kim Krisberg
To the long list of hard-to-pronounce bacteria and viruses that threaten people's health can now be added one more threat: sequestration. Except sequestration isn't a disease — well, unless you'd call Congress' chronic inability to deal with the national debt in a fair and balanced…
August 2, 2012
A bill just passed by the Massachusetts legislature secures important rights for temporary workers. The Temporary Workers Right to Know Act would require temporary staffing agencies to provide employees with a written job order containing information about the staffing agency and worksite employer…
August 1, 2012
By Dick Clapp
After years of diligent and effective advocacy by former Marines and family members, the House voted on July 31, 2012 in favor of the Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act (H.R. 1627). The House version was amended by the Senate and passed earlier in…
July 27, 2012
by Kim Krisberg
In the fall of 2011, a new Texas statute took effect against employers who engage in wage theft, or failing to pay workers as much as they’re owed. The statewide statute put in place real consequences, such as jail time and hefty fines, for employers found guilty of stealing wages…