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May 14, 2007
In March 2006, a coalition of industry trade groups, led by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), filed suit in federal court challenging OSHA's Hazard Communication Standard.  This rule, issued by OSHA in 1983, (48 Federal Register 53280) provides fundamental right-to-know protections…
May 14, 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 41 workplace deaths, including the following: * Wendall Anderson, 58, of Indianapolis was shot outside the Kroger grocery store where he had worked for 30 years…
May 14, 2007
By David Michaels OSHA has been taking a beating in the press recently and now they've started a small campaign to respond. It began with a blistering article (based in part on SKAPPâs work) by Steven Labaton in the New York Times, an article that was then reprinted in several newspapers around the…
May 11, 2007
Friends say he was a good neighbor who mostly kept to himself...Gray Squirrel, Sciurus Carolinensis A disgruntled squirrel stormed Evergreen Elementary School in San Jose, California and started biting anything in sight yesterday, injuring three people including two, 11-year old students and a…
May 11, 2007
By David Michaels In the din of the recent press attention and Senate and House hearings on about OSHAâs failings, itâs easy to forget that OSHA has saved many lives, too. Some evidence on that score comes from a new paper three colleagues and I have just published in Chest (Welch LS, Haile E,…
May 11, 2007
Several bloggers have been following the story of Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant secretary who oversaw the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Serviceâs endangered species program and resigned in disgrace last week, after it was revealed that sheâd been giving industry lobbyists internal agency…
May 10, 2007
By David Michaels Matt Madia at Reg Watch has tipped us off to an article about the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs head Susan Dudley (in the subscription-only BNA), in she which gives us a preview of what we can expect from this part of the executive branch during the remainder of the…
May 9, 2007
I'm going to take a week and a half or so off. More posts after I'm back.
May 9, 2007
New reports on past disasters are in the news this week. Today, the Mine Safety and Health Administration released its report on the Sago Mine Disaster, which killed 12 mine workers; the report cites lightning for sparking the explosion that trapped the miners underground. A clinical study clearly…
May 9, 2007
By David Michaels The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has just released a study examining lung disease and exposure to flavor chemicals among workers at the Carmi Flavor and Fragrance Company factory in Commerce, California. One or possibly two cases of bronchiolitis…
May 8, 2007
I'd love to write something about the biggest-ass supernova ever observed, confirmed to be "something new" based on Chandra observations. There is a press release about it here. Alas, my web-fu has not been good enough yet to turn up an actual preprint or scientific article. The press release…
May 8, 2007
Whether or not that's the message that is intended to be sent, that is the message that is sent. Here's my deal. Vanderbilt has made it 100% clear that without funding at the level of an NSF grant, I will not get tenure, regardless of anything else. Indeed, my chair has told me that funding is…
May 8, 2007
By David Michaels Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro (D-CT), chair of the House of Representatives Appropriations subcommittee that funds the FDA has called on Food and Drug Administration to ban diacetyl until more research is completed. As we've written (here and here, for example), diacetyl is the…
May 8, 2007
The Department of Labor recently published its semi-annual regulatory agenda with revised (again) target dates for OSHA and MSHA rules.  The Department goes through this exercise twice a year, but it is a rare occasion when the "Timetable for Action" dates are actually met.  After just a few…
May 6, 2007
By David Michaels In the last few days, the national media has finally focused on the failure of OSHA to protect workers from devastating lung disease caused by exposure to artificial butter flavor. (The problem goes well beyond microwave popcorn factories, to the flavor industry and other snack…
May 4, 2007
I've been away from my computer for the past several days, so these links are all from the early part of the week: Revere at Effect Measure reports that the situation at National Institute of Environmental Health Science is revealing more damage to federal science. Jacob Goldstein at the WSJ…
May 4, 2007
Every so often, I'll get a forward from some friend or family member (usually not one who started using the Internet in college or grad school, as I did), warning us of some scam, some crime, some upcoming law, or some such. 99+% of the time, this is some sort of hoax. A quick search of the web…
May 4, 2007
There's been a revolution in cosmology in the last 10 years. Alas, many of the popularizations and textbooks are taking time to catch up... mostly because they were published more than 10 years ago, I suppose. As such, there's this idea out there that cosmologists are trying to work out if the…
May 3, 2007
During the April 24, 2007 House Workforce Protection Subcommittee hearing, â"Have OSHA Standards Kept up with Workplace Hazards?", the Bush administrationâs record in promulgating occupational safety and health standards was a hot topic. (âWith all of those [rules] that have been cast aside,â asked…
May 2, 2007
This edition of Occupational Health News Roundup is dedicated to Workersâ Memorial Day, which was observed around the world on April 28th. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: A ceremony commemorated the 100th anniversary of The Pittsburgh Survey (1907-1908), âthe pioneering work of Crystal Eastman and others…
May 2, 2007
John Browne, BPâs CEO has abruptly resigned over revelations about his sex life. For quite some time, Houston Chronicle's business columnist Loren Steffy has been writing about Browne and the safety debacle known as BP. Steffy's comments on Browneâs resignation are priceless: Let me see if I've…
May 1, 2007
Provocative title, eh? I expect many people to instinctively react as angrily to this as I do to the empty clause "intellectual property is property". However, the clause "copyright is censorship" is actually true. What is copyright? It is a law passed by and enforced by governments that places…
May 1, 2007
Scientific papers, like all other sorts of writing or creative expression, are covered by copyright. And, this is potentially a very bad thing. Copyright grants a lot of sweeping rights to the writers of a paper, or the producers of any creative work. Often, those rights get signed away to a…
May 1, 2007
By David Michaels Earlier this month, the National Institute of Healthâs National Toxicology Program fired the contractor that had been running its Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR) after environmental health advocates drew attention to the companyâs chemical industry…
April 30, 2007
One of my pet peeves is when, in an attempt to help convey to others the seriousness of respecting copyrights, patents, and trademarks, somebody says, "Intellectual property is property!" This is often followed by an emotional appeal that just as you would hesitate before breaking into somebody's…
April 30, 2007
Following Chad and Jake, I want to jump off from an article in Science about undergraduate research. It's always nice when some sort of survey confirms one's preexisting biases.... In short, the survey found that performing research increased undergraduates' interest in science and technology…
April 30, 2007
Everybody welcome Mark Hoofnagle and Chris Hoofnagle (probably not their real names) of Denialism who are here to spread more of the commonly accepted lies about the truth of evolution, the Big Bang, gravity, 2+2=4, etc., that we in the scientific establishment spend so much time trying to pull as…
April 30, 2007
By David Michaels All of a sudden, America has become acutely aware of the terrible lung disease caused by workplace exposure to artificial butter flavor. Last week, the failure of OSHA to do anything in response to the outbreak of cases across the country was the subject of several powerful…
April 28, 2007
Uh, no. Look, we're all human, and we all have eyes and brains and things, and as such one may as well admit that if you look at the pictures that Shelly has of herself on her blog, there's a bird. Also, it's a flattering image of the blogger. I suppose, while we're at it, we might as well take a…
April 27, 2007
Check this poem out, posted at Bad Fortune Cookie (found via BoingBoing). Disturbing, eh? Of course, when a student writes a disturbing essay, what do we do in the post-VT massacre world? We lock him up! Freedom of speech be damned, we're locking people up for writing disturbing things! Hysteria…