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June 12, 2007
The Houston Chronicle is reporting that over the next two years, OSHA will be sending 300 federal inspectors to petroleum refineries to evaluate operators processes for handling hazardous chemicals. This announcement comes after the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) issued its comprehensive…
June 11, 2007
This is my second post where I'm writing, for my own reference, the response to one of the old and hoary creationist canards that are brought up in response to things like my long letter to the editor published in the Tennessean, as part of a segment on the question "should you take your kids to…
June 11, 2007
I had a long letter to the editor published in the Tennessean, as part of a segment on the question "should you take your kids to the Creation Museum?" I receive a fair amount of e-mail. This has motivated me to put up, so that I can reference it from now on, my own rejection of a couple of…
June 11, 2007
Tomorrow (June 12th), the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a hearing entitled âAn Examination of the Health Effects of Asbestos and Methods of Mitigating Such Impacts.â The first witness listed is Senator Patty Murray, who for the past several years has been pushing to ban…
June 8, 2007
Most of the misconceptions about and misuses of quantum mechanics (QM) comes a misunderstanding of the stochastic nature of QM. In the 20th century, as we came to understand that QM is how the world works on a fundamental level, we had to abandon the idea that physics was in principle…
June 8, 2007
Given the lack of encouraging global warming developments coming out of the G8 summit, itâs nice to have good news on other topics:
After a two-year boycott by doctors, authors, and healthcare and peace advocates, Lancet publisher Reed Elsevier has agreed to end its involvement in weapon sales â…
June 8, 2007
The image below is an image taken in 1994 with the Hubble Space telescope of galaxy NGC 4526:
Image: NASA, ESA, The Hubble Key Project Team, and The High-Z Supernova Search Team
The bright spot in the lower left is the supernova known as SN1994D. This is a Type~Ia supernova, type type of…
June 8, 2007
Richard Stickler, the Asst. Secretary for MSHA, announced a new educational campaign to increase awareness about black lung disease. This latest initiative comes in response to surveillance data showing newly diagnosed cases of progressive massive fibrosis (PMF) among miners working in Lee…
June 7, 2007
Right now, we're all painfully aware of attacks on science that come from the political Right. However, let us not forget that such attacks can and have in the past come from the political Left, and that indeed anybody with a political ax to grind, and with a strong identification with some…
June 7, 2007
Over the past few years, millions of formlerly secret internal documents from the tobacco industry have been made public and helped public health advocates learn how Big Tobacco deceived lawmakers and the public about smoking's health risks.
Wading through all these documents is time-consuming, so…
June 6, 2007
Breaking news: Another contract worker has been killed on the job at BPâs Texas City refinery â the site of the deadly 2005 explosion that took 15 workersâ lives. The worker, whose name has not been released, was electrocuted while working on an idle unit that was being reconditioned.
Stress on the…
June 6, 2007
Jupiter was at "opposition" yesterday, which means that it's still almost at opposition today. "Opposition" means that it's on exactly the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. The picture to the right shows diagrammatically the layout of the Solar System when Jupiter is at opposition. This…
June 6, 2007
A Republican is somebody who thinks that the first, fourth, and eighth amendments are too dangerous to be followed in the modern world.
A Democrat is somebody who thinks that the second and tenth amendments are too dangerous to be followed in the modern world.
A Libertarian is somebody who thinks…
June 6, 2007
By Dick ClappÂ
Rachel Carson has been in the news quite a lot recently, first as the object of a diatribe by a U.S. Senator, and also in a series of news stories commemorating what would have been her 100th birthday last week. Tim Lambert at Deltoid has addressed the false allegations about…
June 5, 2007
By Liz BorkowskiÂ
In a commentary in the latest issue of JAMA, Sheldon Krimsky (a member of the planning committee for the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy, and a contributor to this blog) and Tania Simoncelli examine the EPAâs guidelines for testing pesticides on humans and find…
June 5, 2007
OSHA issued an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) asking for public input for a possible new safety regulation on mechanical power presses. The existing OSHA regulation is based on a 1971 standard issued by the American National Standards Institute. The ANPRM lists 37 specific…
June 4, 2007
CompUSA screws over a customer bigtime. They sell him an empty box, and when he comes back for a refund, they refuse. They think they can get away with this because, hey, who's he going to tell? Their customer base is so huge that if he and his friends get torqued off and never come back, it's…
June 4, 2007
By David Michaels
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
-Barry Commoner
Tomorrow in New York City Barry Commonerâs friends are gathering to celebrate his 90th birthday. In 2007, Barryâs statement on ecology seems obvious if not trite, but that was not the case…
June 4, 2007
By Peter Dooley
The stories of injury and illness among workers at the Toyota Georgetown plant (reported in the Washington Post story this past week) remind us all about the plight of workers without representation in their workplace. Facing termination after an injury, being transferred to a…
June 4, 2007
The editors at the Charleston Gazette and the Louisville Courier-Journal deserve a pat on the back for allowing their reporters to follow-up on worker safety and health stories.  Ken Ward at the Charleston Gazette is still covering important matters related to MSHA and the Sago mine, more than…
June 1, 2007
When a man with extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) is told not to board a plane and then does so anyway, you have to expect the public health bloggers to come out in force. Tara C. Smith at Aetiology has been on top of this from the start, first laying out the story, then explaining…
June 1, 2007
Caution: Put down your fork before reading this post.
In a recent op-ed published in the Baltimore Sun, colleagues at Johns Hopkins University put in perspective the recent revelations about contaminated animal feed imported from China.Â
...we should be at least as concerned about the "business as…
May 31, 2007
"On January 11, 2006, my husband and best friend, Clyde Jones, was taken from me and the children, family, friends and community...  He went to work one morning for the City that he loved to a job that he loved.  He never came home."Â
These are the words of Casey Jones, yet another heart-…
May 31, 2007
Tammy has posted another edition of the Weekly Toll: Death in the American Workplace at her Weekly Toll blog. It gives short writeups on 57 workplace deaths, including the following:
* David Kessler, Jr., a 27-year-old communications worker from Marysville, Washington, died of severe shock after…
May 31, 2007
President Bush has nominated Dr. James W. Holsinger, Jr. to be U.S. Surgeon General. Here's the short item from the Associated Press:
President Bush has nominated a Kentucky cardiologist who is interested in fighting childhood obesity to be the next surgeon general, the White House announced. The…
May 30, 2007
By David Michaels
Chris Cillizza of WashingtonPost.com's The Fix blog reports that former U.S. Senator Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) is "growing more and more serious about a run for president" - in fact, he's chosen a "campaign manager in waiting."
Tom Collamore, a former vice president of public…
May 30, 2007
Manuel Roig-Franzia at the Washington Post reports that over the past six years, more than 30 journalists have been killed in Mexico, and countless more have been kidnapped. Grenades have been thrown into newspaper offices in Cancun, Hermosillo and Nuevo Laredo, and last week, a newspaper in Sonora…
May 30, 2007
The Bush administration isnât the first to expand executive branch influence over the activities of federal regulatory agencies (like FDA, EPA, and OSHA), but it has taken the practice to a new level. Now that the Democrats are controlling Congress, though, moves by the White House Office of…
May 29, 2007
By Liz Borkowski
While weâre waiting to hear what EPA and ConAgra have learned from studying emissions from microwave popcorn, itâs worth remembering that airborne artificial butter flavoring isnât the only concern associated with this particular convenience food.
Rebecca Renner reported last year…
May 29, 2007
By David Michaels
"The cooperation of ConAgra Foods and the EPA has yielded a comprehensive understanding of butter flavor emissions for consumers."
- Patricia Verduin, Senior Vice President Product Quality & Development, ConAgra Foods, Inc. in a November 29, 2004 letter to Paul Gilman,…