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Ethics sting in Big Pharma country

by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure As an academic epidemiologist I routinely do NIH funded research involving human subjects. That means my university must adhere to very strict regulations and guidelines for the protection of research subjects. Approval and monitoring of the ethical conduct of research funded by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), of which NIH is a part, was made a legal requirement in the 1970s following widespread abuses, of which the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study and the experiments by Nazi doctors were the most notorious. But less flagrant ethical…

Chao and Stickler did WHAT??

Imagine being an MSHA inspector and being asked by independent investigators for your honest and frank opinion about the events surrounding the August 2007 disaster at the Crandall Canyon mine, which took the lives of nine men.  You decide to participate because you genuinely believe in MSHA's mission---enforcing safety and health laws to protect miners' lives---and hope that your insight will help to improve the agency's ability to do just that.  Imagine now a sucker-punch in your gut as you learn that the transcript of your confidential interview has been read by your boss' boss' boss…

The antidepressant suicide link - busted?

The Washington Post reports on the apparent jump in suicide rates since antidepressants got a black-box warning in 2004 after some reports suggested an increased suicide rate in youths after the initial prescription. The article here (goddamn WaPo still can't figure out how to link anyone but themselves) shows a disturbing correlation: METHOD: The authors examined U.S. and Dutch data on prescription rates for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) from 2003 to 2005 in children and adolescents (patients up to age 19), as well as suicide rates for children and adolescents, using…

Why quarantine for measles is critical...and quarantine for Ebola was not

Measles has come to the happiest place on Earth. As of this writing, a total of 32 cases of measles have been linked to Disneyland visits that took place between December 17th and 20th. About 75% of the cases identified to date were not vaccinated, either because they chose to forgo vaccines or because they were too young, and at least 6 have been hospitalized. A measles outbreak is a public health disaster, which can cost into the millions of dollars in health resources. You can be sure that public health workers in California and beyond are working overtime trying to identify cases, educate…

Ebola reemerges from the forest

Ebola has surfaced again. After a hiatus of over a year without any new identified outbreaks, the virus has reemerged in western Africa, in the first-ever multi-country outbreak of the Zaire strain of Ebola. As of this writing, there have been 122 suspected cases of the disease in Guinea (24 laboratory-confirmed per the WHO) and 80 deaths (66% mortality rate). Most of these cases have been in Guekedou and Macenta in rural Guinea, about 35 miles apart, but what's really concerning is that at least 11 cases have also been identified in Guinea's capital of 2 million people, Conakry. Conakry is…

"Pox" by Michael Willrich

Next to Ebola, my favorite virus would probably be smallpox (Variola virus). I mean, now that it's eradicated in nature, what's not to love about the mysteries it's left us--where it came from, why it was so deadly (or, not so deadly, as in the emergence of the "mild" form, variola minor), and will a new poxvirus emerge to take its place? The topic is particularly germane since the debate still rages on about the fate of the world's smallpox stocks. Smallpox has killed untold millions and influenced the destiny of societies; and as Michael Willrich details in his new book, Pox: An American…

Worms: Are they good or bad for us?

Student guest post by Shylo Wardyn "Of all the parasites I've had over the years, these worms are among the... hell, they are the best". Was Fry from the animated show 'Futurama' right in his assessment of worms being good for him? Did he know something about parasitic worm infections that I was unaware of? Well, in the show, his parasites were doing remarkable things for his body, but does this translate to real life at all? Some people think so. Altman reviews the idea that over evolutionary time, our ancestors were infected with all sorts of parasites and this led to an interaction…

AIDS denial and creationism--common thread of bad statistics

Regular readers are very familiar with my refrain that many science deniers use the same tactics: bad arguments, quote-mining, appeals to authority, castigation of originators of respective theories, etc. etc. Another common thread is the complete bastardization of statistical analysis. Mark Chu-Carroll elaborates on Peter Duesberg's misuse of statistics here, while mathematician John Allen Paulos destroys creationist/ID analysis here. I'll highlight some of the best parts below: For those of you who are familiar with creationist/ID arguments, you know that they take an event (say, the…

One Mining Professor Responds

In a post last week entitled Mining Professors Oppose Mine Safety Bill, I invited the signatories of a letter opposing new mine safety legislation to disclose their financial ties to the mining industry (if any) or other related conflicts of interest.  A couple of days later, one of the letter's signers, Larry Grayson, PhD of Penn State University, responded thoughtfully and thoroughly (here and here) to my post.  I respectfully invite the other signatories to follow Dr. Grayson's lead and provide their own disclosures. Professor Grayson, who holds the George H., Jr. and Anne…

Don't Let Mercenaries Advise EPA on Asbestos Science

By David Michaels Product Defense is a lucrative business. The scientists who own and operate these firms make sizable profits helping polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products stymie public health and environmental regulators. The companies, and the scientists, sell not just their scientific expertise, but their knowledge of and access to regulatory agencies. Hire me, they say, because I can get the results you want. I used to work at EPA, or OSHA, or FDA -- I know how they operate, and besides, the folks at the agency will always answer my phone calls. This is mercenary science.…

OSHA Fails Chemical Safety Board's Inspection

By David Michaels The Chemical Safety Board isnât pulling its punches. Its report on the March 2005 BP refinery explosion which killed 15 workers is scathing in its criticism of BP, concluding that âorganizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporationâ caused the explosion. More surprisingly, CSB also went after OSHA for falling down on the job. OSHA, according to the CSB didnât have enough trained inspectors, didnât make enough inspections, and didnât bother enforcing the Process Safety Management (PSM) standard aimed at preventing explosions of this sort: only 0.2% of…

Science Blogging Conference: Science Blogs Meet Science Tradition

The Science Blogging Conference, held this past weekend at UNC-Chapel Hill, wasnât just for bloggers. Many of the attendees, particularly science students and educators, came to learn how they could use blogs, and some of them launched their own blogs over the course of the weekend. The journalists in attendance seemed to be immersed in the blogosphere already: some were blogging as part of their jobs, some relied on bloggers as sources, and some were both bloggers and journalists. During the conference, I found it particularly interesting to hear different conversations about how blogging…

Emerging disease and zoonoses #10--monkeypox

For the final post of the series, I want to discuss yet another outbreak, this one a bit closer to home: that of monkeypox in the United States in 2003. First, I should note that "monkeypox" is a bit of a misnomer. Though the virus--a relative of smallpox and cowpox--can infect monkeys (and humans), the reservoir host is likely a rodent. Previously, monkeypox had been found mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, in forested regions. 2 clades of the virus had been identified. One was common in West Africa, and generally didn't cause severe disease when humans became infected with it. The other…

Condors and vultures: their postures, their 'bald heads' and their sheer ecological importance

For no particular reason, here are some interesting raptor photos. Birds of many kinds often sit around with their wings only partially folded, partly hanging down at their sides; one reason for this is that they're sun-bathing and are using their wings to soak up heat. Among raptors, this behaviour is well known for Turkey vultures Cathartes aura in particular. But many others do it, and here's another New World vulture (cathartid), an Andean condor Vultur gryphus, doing the same thing [photo by Markus Bühler, taken at Berlin Zoo]. During cold weather, captive Andean condors are reported…

Why do some owls have ear tufts?

It's going to be a busy week, and already I've been totally unable to finish any of the planned articles. But I'll do what I can. In an effort to produce something short and sweet, here's a look at a question I've been pondering for a while: why do some owls have ear tufts? There are currently round about 225 living owl species, and of those about 50 have what we commonly call ear tufts. As with so many structures present in animals, we have little idea as to what these are for, and little hypothesis testing has been done. However, several very interesting hypotheses exist... My favourite…

Goodbye from the stem-haematotherm, goodbye from me

Congratulations are in order: well done Dave Hughes, David Marjanović and Allen Hazen in particular. No, the creature shown yesterday is not a squabrat from The Dark Crystal (if there is such a thing), Romer's hellasaur, an old picture of a colugo, a proto-bat, proto-pterosaur, arboreal theropod, antiquated archaeopterygid, tree shrew, climbing duck-possum, arboreal gorgonopsian, proto-ropen, or one of Dougal Dixon's arbrosaurs: it is, instead, the hypothetical stem-haematotherm depicted in Philippe Janvier's 1984 article on the Haematothermia concept. It made an appearance both within the…

The Frasercot: an enigmatic new carnivoran known only from its pelt

In another desperate effort to bump up the number of hits, I thought I'd go with a provocative title. There is, sorry, no such thing as a Frasercot: but it is, however, the answer to the question... to what animal, exactly, does that mysterious skin actually belong? No, it was not feathers, nor scales on a moth's wing (!), nor the skin of an octopus (!!), but most definitely the pelt of some sort of carnivoran (I enlarged and rotated a section of the adjacent image). But the problem is: that's about as far as we can go, as no-one really seems to know what it is... The skin is now owned by…

Process Declarations in Pica

Sorry for the slow pace of things around here lately; life interferes sometimes. I've mentioned my fathers illness before; things took a drastic change for the worse a week ago, which made things more than a little bit crazy. Of course, life wouldn't be life in things happened one at a time; so naturally, my asthma picked now to act up as well, so I've been coughing my lungs out. It's been a fun week, really. Anyway, I've been wanting to look a bit more at Pica. I've been thinking about how a named process definition looks, and what it does. The type part of a definition is relatively…

Moving on: π-calculus and common programming idioms

Before diving off into real content, the name of my little π-calculus monstrosity has been chosen. As several people recommended in the comments, I'm going to go with Pica. So, today, we're going to take the dive, and start looking at some interesting semantics of the language. The goal of this is still to work on Pica's type system: I want to work towards a first draft of what a process type will look like. But to figure out what a process type should look like, we need to think about how process abstractions will be defined and used in Pica, what control structures are going to look like…

Basics: Natural Numbers and Integers

One of the interestingly odd things about how people understand math is numbers. It's astonishing to see how many people don't really understand what numbers are, or what different kinds of numbers there are. It's particularly amazing to listen to people arguing vehemently about whether certain kinds of numbers are really "real" or not. Today I'm going to talk about two of the most basic kind of numbers: the naturals and the integers. This is sort of an advanced basics article; to explain things like natural numbers and integers, you can either write two boring sentences, or you can go a…

Law vs. Thuggery: The Execution of Saddam

The big news over the last couple of days has been the execution of Saddam Hussein. I want to put in my own two cents about it. It's not math, but it does at least involve a bit of logic. I wish I could remember who first said this, but I really don't know. But the important thing, in a moral sense, about the whole mess with Saddam is that he was a thug. A vicious, bloodthirsty, sadistic, evil thug who believed that *power* justified itself. *He* was the strongest thug in Iraq; therefore, according to his own worldview, he got to do whatever he wanted until someone stronger came along. Rape,…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 12 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Reef Endemism, Host Specificity and Temporal Stability in Populations of Symbiotic Dinoflagellates from Two Ecologically Dominant Caribbean Corals: The dinoflagellate genus Symbiodinium forms symbioses with…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 18 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Mathematical Logic in the Human Brain: Syntax: Theory predicts a close structural relation of formal languages with natural languages. Both share the aspect of an underlying grammar which either generates (…

Friday Weird Sex Blogging - The Birds Do It....

You should check out all of my SiBlings' Friday Blogging practices, then come back here for a new edition of Friday Weird Sex Blogging. Last week you saw an example of a corkscrew penis. But that is not the only one of a kind. See more under the fold (first posted on July 14, 2006)... Some birds also have spiral tools. For instance, see this 20-cm penis of an Argentine lake duck (Oxyura vittata) (from this paper: The 20-cm Spiny Penis of the Argentine Lake Duck (Oxyura vittata) (pdf)): The same author, Dr Kevin McCracken of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, later found an even longer…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 26 awesome new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. If you are reluctant to post ratings, notes and comments, perhaps you should read this first. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: The Dusk Chorus from an Owl Perspective: Eagle Owls Vocalize When Their White Throat Badge Contrasts Most: An…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 9 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Population Dynamics Constrain the Cooperative Evolution of Cross-Feeding: Cross-feeding is the exchange of nutrients among species of microbes. It has two potential evolutionary origins, one as an exchange of…

Friday Weird Sex Blogging - The Birds Do It....

You should check out all of my SiBlings' Friday Blogging practices, then come back here for a new edition of Friday Weird Sex Blogging. Last week you saw an example of a corkscrew penis. But that is not the only one of a kind. See more under the fold (first posted on July 14, 2006)... Some birds also have spiral tools. For instance, see this 20-cm penis of an Argentine lake duck (Oxyura vittata) (from this paper: The 20-cm Spiny Penis of the Argentine Lake Duck (Oxyura vittata) (pdf)): The same author, Dr Kevin McCracken of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, later found an even longer…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Why Was The Racehorse Eclipse So Good?: Scientists from the Royal Veterinary College and the University of Cambridge are researching what made the undefeated 18th Century horse, Eclipse, such a great champion. The genetics research is giving insights into the origins of the world's thoroughbred racing stock, including the sensational 1867 Derby winner, Hermit. 'Divorce' Among Galapagos Seabirds Investigated: Being a devoted husband and father is not enough to keep an avian marriage together for the Nazca booby, a long-lived seabird found in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador.…

Bloggers....In.....Spaaaaace! Interview with Talia Page

Talking Science is a new non-profit that's dedicated to bringing the latest discoveries, innovations, controversies and cures out of the lab and to the public. It was founded by Ira Flatow, host of NPR's Science Friday. As a part of this effort, Talia Page is one of the bloggers for Science Friday and Talking Science Abroad. Talia came to the Science Blogging Conference as a part of the Science Friday delegation. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real Life job?…

Circumhorizon Arc: Response to a Reader

Okay, my peeps, when you ask questions, I try to hunt down the relevant expert or individual quoted in a news story if I don't know the answer myself and I pass on your questions to that person (or to the webmaster at their site) and then .. I hope for the best. This time, one of the people cited in a news story did respond to one of my readers' queries, so I am very happy to share that response with all of you, especially because it is quite interesting (but aren't all of these science-y things interesting?). Mark Paris wrote; Wouldn't this actually be a partial halo as opposed to a…

Do We Each Get the Comments We Deserve?

From Baldur Bjarnason, the reality of writing on the web: 15. People will always prefer you to state the obvious and spout common sense. If you say anything that requires a bit of thinking, or that would require them to learn new skills or ideas, your audience will evaporate into nothing, no matter how important those new things are. (Also see point 8 above.) You can trust that ideas that are new and unfamiliar to an audience will be either ignored or met with anger. 16. Nobody cares when you’re right but a lot of people really enjoy it when you’re wrong. They will rub it in your face. 17.…

Iceland 2.0 - the Constitutional Crisis

helvítis fokking fokk! this is why you should never go with the 2.0 - always wait for 2.1 so, er, funny thing happened... the Icelandic President vetoed the law passed by Alþingi right at the end of 2009. The one that acceded to all UK and Dutch demands in the IceSave fiasco. This is a first. As you know, faithful reader, Iceland, as usual, lead the world last year, into catastrophic banking crisis this time. The grossly corrupt, overleveraged, Icelandic banks did a classic domino collapse, triggered in some sense by the Lehman Bros collapse in the US, through a classic bank run, and capped…

SN 0.Ia

A couple of years ago, a group of California theorists came up with a whacky theory for a new kind of thermonuclear supernova. It would be just like regular type Ia supernovae, but fainter and faster, and a bit more mixed up, as evidenced by its new label: the 0.Ia supernova, a perfect mallogos of a neologism. So now someone had to go and find one, with plenty more to come. As you know, Bob, there are two types of Supernovae, type I and II. Supernovae are stars blowing up, big time, and: type I supernovae do not have hydrogen emission lines, while type II supernovae do have hydrogen…

Usher syndrome, Part I: an introduction to sensory perception

Guest Blogger Danio: In my introductory post I mentioned that my research focuses on the genetics of hereditary deaf-blindness, specifically Usher syndrome. As it's likely that many of you have never heard of it, I thought I'd kick it up a notch with some sciency posts on what we know about Usher syndrome and what we think we can contribute to the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Usher syndrome is a genetically recessive condition characterized by hearing impairment, usually from birth, which is due to the degeneration of sensory neurons in the inner ear, and blindness due to retinal…

Combating Corruptive Cynicism

For a couple of hours on friday night, I got to feel like I was 18 again. Billy Bragg was in town, playing the the State Theatre, before going on to Ithaca, where is playing the State Theatre tonight, strangely enough. Billy was on form. Mostly political Billy, not so much the romantic Billy, but funny and engaging, not the angry Billy. I first saw Billy Bragg in concert at the Student Union at Sussex in the autumn of 1983. It was the first gig of an extraordinary lineup of up-and-coming bands that the Ents Committee had managed to book, best year since they got this unknown american "…

We don't need teleology — so why bother?

Tony Sidaway discusses a unifying property of theistic evolutionists: the desire or need for there to be some kind of universal plan for their existence. It's not an attitude I understand very well; I don't think it makes life better to believe that there is some ineffable teleological intent behind the events in your life, and no one ever bothers to explain why it would be preferable to be a pawn to a cosmic puppetmaster. Their reasoning also tends to be incredibly bad, as can be seen in the article by Mark Vernon that inspired Tony's musings. The work of Conway Morris, and now many others,…

Samoan Butterflies Evolve Rapidly and Avoid Extinction

A male Blue Moon or Great Eggfly butterfly, Hypolimnas bolina. A butterfly-killing bacteria that is only lethal to males has given rise to skewed sex ratios in populations of this species on two islands in the South Pacific, but researchers have found that male butterflies on one island have bounced back, thanks to the rise of a suppressor gene. [larger]. In a dramatic demonstration of how quickly evolution can occur, a butterfly species that is found on two adjacent islands in the South Pacific Ocean has rapidly evolved genetic defenses against a bacterial parasite that is lethal only…

Mystery Bird: Purple Finch, Carpodacus purpureus

tags: Purple Finch, Carpodacus purpureus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Purple Finch, Carpodacus purpureus -- a hatching-year bird of unknown sex -- photographed in central New York. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Rick Wright [larger view]. NOTE: Rick says this is a favorite image because it shows the wing formula so well, so in this case, we are going to ask you to age and sex this bird as well as identify it. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide,…

Big Brown LOSES Today's Belmont Stakes

tags: Big Brown, horseracing, Triple Crown, streaming video Big Brown fights with his jockey, Kent Desormeaux, in the stretch before he crosses the finish line last in the 140th Belmont Stakes at Belmont Park in Elmont, N.Y. on Saturday, June 7, 2008. Image: Chang W. Lee, NYTimes. Big Brown was the favorite to win to today's Belmont Stakes, the 140th time this classic race has been run. Big Brown started from the far inside post position and ran against eight rivals in the 1.5 mile (2.41 kilometers) race, often referred to as the "Test of a Champion." The record for this race, 2:24, was…

Advance Reading Copy: Alex And Me: A 30-Year Adventure

tags: Alex And Me: A 30-Year Adventure, Alex & Me: Lessons from a Little Bird with a Big Heart, ethology, cognition, learning, parrots, Irene Pepperberg, book review As a scientist, parrot researcher, aviculturist and parrot companion, I have met Irene Pepperberg several times, at both scientific meetings and also at avicultural meetings, and I have followed her research closely (but quietly) for most of my life. So, when Seed Media, which houses all of ScienceBlogs, asked me if I wanted to read and review Pepperberg's upcoming book, Alex & Me: Lessons from a Little Bird with a Big…

A Sure Sign that Spring Hath Sprunged (1 of 2)

tags: birds, Northern cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis, ornithology, Image of the Day Papa Museum's left eye was unwaveringly fixed on mine. Male Northern cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis. Image: Bob Levy, author of Club George [larger view]. Bob Levy writes: A sure sign that "spring hath sprunged" is the appearance of songbird nests. I found my first one this season in an unexpected fashion but then I have come to expect the unexpected when bird-watching. For several minutes I had been standing beside a wrought iron fence where the sight and sound of a singing male House Finch mesmerized…

Early Morning on a Kansas Prairie

Portrait of a male Greater Prairie-Chicken, Tympanuchus cupido. Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU. 2007. This morning, I had the great privilege to watch male Greater Prairie-chickens, Tympanuchus cupido pinnatus, perform on a lek site located on the Konza Prairie in Kansas, along with Dave Rintoul's ornithology class. Not only was this the first time I'd seen lekking behavior for this species, but this was the first time I'd ever seen this species in the wild. To do this, I crawled out of bed at 430am, so I had enough time to comb the tangles out of my hair (I learned that all hair conditioners…

Demands for safer working conditions, fair wages drew Martin Luther King to Memphis

We commemorate today the life of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the inspirational civil rights leader who was assassinated at age 39 in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.   Rev. King was visiting Memphis to support hundreds of city sanitation workers in their demands for safer working conditions and dignity on the job. Martin Luther King Jr. In an interview taped for the StoryCorps project, Mr. Elmore Nickelberry and Mr. Taylor Rogers describe their experience as Memphis sanitation workers in 1968. Taylor Rogers:  "Our day was awful. Everyday.  We had these tubs that we had to put the…

Maintenance matters — in cookstoves and other global health interventions

While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from last year. This post was originally published on May 8, 2012. By Liz Borkowski At Wonkblog, Brad Plumer highlights a new NBER paper that’s disappointing to those who hoped that distributing cleaner cookstoves in India and other countries would be an easy way to improve respiratory health and help slow global warming. Many low-cost, traditional cookstoves belch soot, which is bad for the lungs of people who spend long hours near the stoves and for the ice that melts more quickly when soot particles settle on it. Cleaner stoves would…

Public health association adopts new policies opposing military recruiting in schools, supporting taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages

At last week's American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting its Governing Council adopted about a dozen new policies to guide the Association's advocacy activities.  Over APHA's 140 year history, these resolutions have covered a variety of public health topics, from the 1950 policy supporting fluoridation of public water supplies, the 1960 policy supporting compulsory pasteurization of milk, the 1969 policy calling for American forces to be withdrawn from Vietnam, to the 1982 policy condemning the apartheid policy of the Government of the Republic of South Africa, and the 2009…

Rethinking who does what in healthcare: Examples from New Mexico and Zambia

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 providers patients need to see to get care for particular conditions. In the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Sarah Kliff describes efforts by Albuquerque physician Sanjeev Arora to make Hepatitis C treatment available to patients across New Mexico. Arora is one of a small number of Hepatitis C specialists…

"Jared did everything right"

[Updated 12/28/2014: see below] Those were the first words out of the mouth of the Southwest Airlines' official when describing the incident on January 27, 2012 at Dulles International Airport that claimed the life of 25 year-old employee Jared Patrick Dodson. The five-year employee was driving a luggage cart when he was fatally struck by a three-story people mover used to transfer passengers across the airport tarmac. Scott Halfmann vice president for safety and security said young Mr. Dodson was following all procedures correctly. He was in the proper travel lane. He stopped at all…

Worker safety rule stuck in White House black hole, disease risk persists

More than 425 days----that's 14 months----have passed since the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sent to the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) a draft proposed regulation designed to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. The hazard is one of the oldest known causes of work-related lung disease, yet OSHA does not have a comprehensive, protective standard on the books to address it. In the last few decades, epidemiological studies have also found a strong association between silica exposure and…

Report reveals fatal lapses in UCLA lab safety leading to death of 23 year-old lab tech

A previously confidential report prepared by the California Bureau of Investigations (BOI) reveals a reckless disregard for worker safety by a UCLA chemistry professor (and the university itself) which led to the 2009 death of research assistant Sheri Sangji, 23. Sangji was a new employee in a UCLA chemistry lab. She was hired primarily to set up lab equipment, but on Dec. 29, 2008 she was assigned to use a highly reactive liquid that spontaneously ignites when exposed to air. The BOI report calls into question UCLA's claims that the young woman was a trained and experienced chemist. The LA…

A peek at health and safety for temporary workers

March 2, 2011 may have seemed like any other workday for David Clark Jr., 51, when he arrived at the Lee Creek potash mine in Aurora, NC at 5:50 am to start his shift. Clark and a small crew would be excavating a large ditch near the R9 roadway and burying a 22-inch diameter polyethylene (HDPE) pipe. The pipe would be used to carry the "slurry" created by processing the phosphate ore. The task involved fusing four large sections of the HDPE pipe together to make one length of pipe. Clark was a 24-year employee of Trader Construction Company and had worked as a contractor at the Lee Creek…