Liz Borkowski
lborkowski
Posts by this author
September 27, 2010
The latest issue of The Economist features a special report on forests, which perform valuable services like sequestering carbon and regulating runoff. Because people can easily get paid for timber (or crops grown on deforested land) but not so easily for preserving forests, deforestation is…
September 22, 2010
44-year-old Iraq veteran Tim Wymore suffers from brain lesions, a blood disorder, and other health problems that leave him unable to walk unassisted. His wife, Shanna, quit her job to be his full-time caregiver. Wymore is one of several hundred veterans who've fired lawsuits related to exposure to…
September 22, 2010
September 22nd is World Car-Free Day, when people everywhere are encouraged to get out of their cars and try different modes of getting around. The Metro DC Car-Free Day is also encouraging people to try "Car-Lite" options like carpooling, or to eliminate the need for a trip to the office by…
September 20, 2010
If you're working on a major global problem like poverty, it's important to have goals to work towards. Back in 2000, world leaders came together and adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which commits to reducing extreme poverty and sets out a series of goals to be reached by 2015.…
September 17, 2010
In the words of Myron Levin at Fair Warning:The Government Accountability Office (GAO) once again has ripped the whistleblower protection program. ....[It] blames glaring weaknesses on chronic inattention from OSHA leaders."
This latest GAO assessment, "Sustained management attention needed to…
September 17, 2010
Earlier this week, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg presented Frances Kelsey with the first in what will be a series of awards bearing Kelsey's name. Fifty years ago, as a new medical officer with the FDA, Kelsey refused to approve US sale of Kevadon, a drug widely recognized by its generic name,…
September 13, 2010
The World Health Organization has declared that "tobacco taxes are the most effective way to reduce tobacco use, especially among young people and the poor," but Slate's James Ledbetter points out that in the US, there's a portion of the smoking population that keeps on paying them:
Over the last…
September 10, 2010
Another oil platform caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico, but this time the crew - 13 workers - was able to escape, and no injuries were reported. No oil spill was detected, either. The Mariner Energy platform was involved in both oil and natural gas production.
A Washington Post article on the fire…
September 7, 2010
Remember the global food crisis of 2008? Disappointing wheat harvests in Europe, the US, and Australia led to a shortfall in global supplies, and poorer countries and consumers couldn't afford grain that had suddenly become much more expensive. In the US, families struggled to stretch their food…
September 3, 2010
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…
September 2, 2010
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…
September 1, 2010
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…
August 31, 2010
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…
August 31, 2010
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…
August 27, 2010
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…
August 26, 2010
Last week, a jury in Chicago awarded $30.4 million to chemical-flavoring plant worker Gerardo Solis, 45, who suffers from the disabling lung disease bronchiolitis obliterans. Solis had worked at the Flavorchem Corp plant from 1998 to 2006 and was exposed to the butter-flavoring chemical diacetyl,…
August 24, 2010
The Iowa-based company Wright County Egg is recalling 380 million eggs, which were sold to distributors and wholesalers in 22 states and Mexico, due to concerns about salmonella contamination. The eggs have been sold under several different brand names, so if you've got eggs in your fridge you can…
August 22, 2010
An August 5th collapse at the San Jose gold and copper mine in Chile's Atacama region trapped 33 miners hundreds of meters underground. Rescue teams had been drilling toward a refuge site, where it was hoped the miners had been able to take shelter - and earlier today, a probe sent down into the…
August 20, 2010
Check out Carnal Carnival #1: Essentials of Elimination, hosted by Bora at A Blog Around the Clock. It's a fascinating collection of blog posts all about poop. (The post I put up yesterday on sanitation is among them.) Many of the posts are about the interesting things scientists can learn by…
August 19, 2010
I noted in my post about Pakistan that a shortage of clean water for millions of flood victims may lead to outbreaks of diarrheal diseases. It's worth getting into the issue of how unclean water causes these diseases. Basically, the problem is water contaminated by human feces.
In Clinical…
August 18, 2010
Before BP's name was linked in everyone's mind to the Gulf oil disaster, the company was infamous for its unsafe Texas City refinery, where a March 2005 explosion killed 15 workers and injured 170. In September 2005, OSHA cited BP for $21 million, and BP paid the fine and entered into an agreement…
August 17, 2010
Flooding in Pakistan has killed 1,600 and is affecting an estimated 20 million people. Six million lack access to food, shelter, and water. The report of a single confirmed cholera case (in the Swat valley) is generating some headlines, but the important point is that a lack of clean water makes…
August 16, 2010
Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health David Michaels has sent a letter to Occupational Safety and Health Administration staff laying out a vision for how OSHA can do a better job of protecting worker health and safety over the coming years. In "OSHA at Forty: New…
August 11, 2010
When I visited Shanghai a few years ago, one of my favorite moments was riding the maglev train from the airport to a Metro station on the outskirts of the city. As I recall, its speed got up to around 250 mph - a counter in each car displayed the speed, and the numbers changed in a blur as the…
August 10, 2010
Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn have released a report on "100 Stimulus Projects that Give Taxpayers the Blues." Their introduction rails against "torrential, misdirected government spending," and short descriptions of the 100 projects singled out for ridicule are evidently supposed to disgust…
August 9, 2010
In a recent New York Times article, Celia Dugger reports on encouraging results from two studies on interventions that help women in South Africa and Malawi reduce their risk of HIV infection. The first study found that women using a vaginal microbicidal gel were 39% less likely to contract HIV…
August 6, 2010
Back in February, an explosion at the Kleen Energy Systems plant in Middletown, Connecticut killed six workers and injured others. Workers had been finishing construction on the natural gas power plant, and natural gas under high pressure was being pumped through new fuel lines to remove debris.…
August 5, 2010
If you haven't already, go read Atul Gawande's New Yorker article "Letting Go." As a surgeon, Gawande knows how doctors tend to death with terminally ill patients, both because of their training and their ordinary human tendencies. As a writer, he knows how to weave together personal stories and…
August 4, 2010
Last week, two workers were killed in an Illinois grain elevator. Alejandro Pacas, 19, and Wyatt Whitebread, 14, were engulfed by shelled corn in the Mount Carroll grain facility, which is owned by Haasbach, LLC. A third victim, Will Piper, 20, was trapped for approximately six hours before…
August 3, 2010
BP's well in the Gulf of Mexico has been capped and may soon be "killed" for good, but fixing the widespread damage from the disaster will take years. The National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health has has released a report (supported by the…