Liz Borkowski
lborkowski
Posts by this author
March 8, 2011
Given how many complaints we've been hearing lately about wasteful government spending, I thought this might be a good time to highlight some lesser-known, worthwhile government-funded programs that promote public health. (Core agency functions, like EPA's Clean Air Act enforcement, are also…
March 7, 2011
As part of a series on the "penny-and-pound foolish cuts the House Republicans want to impose," the New York Times editorial board lambastes a proposal to cut federal funding to Poison Control Centers from $29 million (Obama's request) to $2 million. This federal money only covers about 20% of the…
March 4, 2011
Earlier this week, the EPA released a report that quantifies costs and benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments - and, surprise, surprise, the benefits substantially outweigh the costs: $2 trillion vs. $65 billion in 2020.
Specifically, The Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act from 1990 to…
March 2, 2011
A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Deborah Blum at Slate: Bring Back the Poison Squad ("If we look back to a similar crisis of food safety in the last century, we see that federal regulators were willing to risk their lives to protect the rest of us.")
Jenny Gold of Kaiser Health News on NPR:…
March 1, 2011
Helen Pearson has just written a fascinating Nature News article about a British cohort study - the National Survey of Health and Development, run by the Medical Research Council - that's been following more than 5,000 subjects since their births in 1946. Cohort studies take groups of people who…
February 25, 2011
For its 40th anniversary, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has compiled a timeline of key milestones during its history. The big picture is a positive one:
Although accurate statistics were not kept at the time, it is estimated that in 1970 around 14,000 workers were killed on the…
February 24, 2011
We're hearing a lot of rhetoric about the need to slash government spending, so it's a good time to remind everyone that there's no such thing as a free lunch - and if you think you're getting a free lunch, it might be loaded with pathogens.
Maryn McKenna, writing at Superbug about a New England…
February 23, 2011
By Dick Clapp
An ambitious paper was released in Boston last week, with subsequent media coverage in local, national and international outlets (see, for example the New York Times' Green Blog and Reuters). The first author, Paul Epstein, was interviewed on the Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise,…
February 18, 2011
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its annual meeting in DC this week, and the organization is presenting awards to "professional journalists for distinguished reporting for a general audience." An endowment from the Kavli Foundation funds the awards program, which…
February 17, 2011
Cross-posted from the American Geophysical Union's GeoSpace blog.
Even though the deadly cholera epidemic in Haiti is now spreading more slowly, health officials are still working to prevent as many new cases as possible. Detailed models of the disease's spread help those in charge of making public…
February 16, 2011
By Elizabeth Grossman
Since release of its Final Report to the President on January 11th, the National Oil Spill Commission has released five additional papers (called "working papers") reviewing aspects of the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil disaster - three on February 3rd and two on February 8th. On…
February 15, 2011
The Kaiser Family Foundation has just released a report on the future of global health journalism, and it's not surprising to hear that the traditional model of covering global health is crumbling. KFF commissioned journalists Nellie Bristol and John Donnelly to conduct this research, and their…
February 11, 2011
A.G. Sulzberger reports in the New York Times about a new practice by some employers: refusing to hire smokers:
More hospitals and medical businesses in many states are adopting strict policies that make smoking a reason to turn away job applicants, saying they want to increase worker productivity…
February 10, 2011
Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic blogs: On Labor ("My son is the joy of my life. But the work of ushering him into the world nearly killed his mother.")
Scicurious at Neurotic Physiology: Dieting, Stress, and the Changing Brain.
Robert Reich's Blog at the Christian Science Monitor: US Chamber of…
February 9, 2011
Last week, Mark Bittman published the New York Times column "A Food Manifesto for the Future," in which he proposed ways to "make the growing, preparation and consumption of food healthier, saner, more productive, less damaging and more enduring." Among his suggestions was outlawing concentrated…
February 7, 2011
Researchers from the University of Maryland School of Nursing and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine examined data from 71 Illinois and North Carolina hospitals and found that "patient deaths from pneumonia and acute myocardial infarction were significantly more likely in hospitals…
February 4, 2011
Ben McGrath has an excellent article on "the NFL and the concussion crisis" in the January 31st issue of the New Yorker. It's well worth a read (though it might change the way you see the Superbowl), but the thing I want to highlight is the roles of Alan Schwarz and the New York Times in raising…
February 2, 2011
Some villages in Pakistan's Sindh province are still underwater following August's floods, and a new UNICEF survey has found that nearly one-fourth of the children under five there are malnourished. The deputy head of UNICEF Pakistan, Karen Allen, calls conditions "shockingly bad" and compares them…
January 28, 2011
Atul Gawande's latest New Yorker article, "The Hot Spotters," is a must-read for anyone concerned about the out-of-control growth of US healthcare costs (and that description should apply to everyone in this country). It's about possible solutions to the problem of the highest-cost patients, who…
January 27, 2011
Gym regulars might grumble when classes and locker rooms fill with resolute new members each January, but the crowds rarely last long. I'm sure many gyms' revenue models depend on members who pay monthly fees but use the facilities infrequently, if at all. These people (and I've been one in the…
January 26, 2011
Cholera has killed roughly 3,800 people in Haiti and sickened another 189,000, and it will continue to circulate in the population for the foreseeable future. The good news is that the number of new cases per week has dropped from 12,000, which it reached in November, to about 4,700, and the…
January 24, 2011
On April 5, 2010, a massive explosion at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, West Virginia, killed 29 miners. Last week, federal Mine Safety and Health Administration investigators briefed victims' relatives on what MSHA thinks happened at the mine. (MSHA's official final report is…
January 19, 2011
In the new executive order, which Rena Steinzor wrote about yesterday, President Obama stated that agencies must "propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that its benefits justify its costs." This isn't a revolutionary requirement; public-health agencies are already…
January 18, 2011
This week, House Republicans are voting on whether to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Their bill, misleadingly titled "The Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act," has a good chance of passing the House but virtually none of passing the Senate or being signed by the…
January 18, 2011
by Rena Steinzor, cross-posted from CPR Blog
Sixteen months ago, President Obama stood in the well of Congress and issued a ringing call for a progressive vision of government. Working to persuade Members of Congress to adopt health care reform, he said that"large-heartedness...is part of the…
January 13, 2011
A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Travis Saunders at the Scientific American Guest Blog: Can sitting too much kill you?
Tanya Snyder in Streetsblog Capitol Hill: Actually, Highway Builders, Roads Don't Pay for Themselves
Tina Rosenberg for the New York Times' Opinionator: To Beat Back Poverty…
January 13, 2011
by Eileen Senn, MS
The multiple options that OSHA is considering to address their badly outdated rules for chemical hazards were described in my November 17 post. They include updating OSHA Permissible Exposure Limits (PELs) which are erroneously considered to be safe levels for chemicals in…
January 12, 2011
One year after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed more than 200,000 Haitians and left 1.5 million homeless, conditions in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation are still grim. Cholera has killed 3,600 people and weakened many more; the UN warns that 650,000 may be affected over the next several…
January 11, 2011
According to new research from the Institute for Women's Policy Research, in 2010 44 million private-sector US employees, or 42% of the workforce, lacked access to paid sick time. This IWPR analysis distinguishes between employees who are eligible for paid sick time vs. those who can actually…
January 7, 2011
Earlier this week, riots erupted over food prices in several Algerian cities - according to Reuters, prices for flour and salad oil there have doubled over the past few months. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's food price index is now slightly higher than it was during the last global food…