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Trump’s mine safety nominee defends MSHA inspectors, calls silicosis “unacceptable”

President Trump’s nominee to head the Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) appeared today before a Senate committee for a confirmation hearing. David Zatezalo answered questions about the epidemic of black lung cases, an increase in mine worker fatalities, the need for safety assistance for small mine operators, and more. Zatezalo began his career in 1974 as a UMWA coal miner and most recently served as chairman of Rhino Resources. I watched the webcast of Zatezalo's confirmation hearing. The nominee noted his experience managing 39 different coal mines in the U.S.…

Doctors, public health workers, patient advocates — even insurers — oppose latest ACA repeal

Senate Republicans are again trying to ram through an Affordable Care Act replacement that threatens the health and well-being of millions of Americans. It’s shameful. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at what people who actually work in health care are saying about the Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson bill. In this interview, Sen. Bill Cassidy insists that his bill would protect people with pre-existing conditions. Blue Cross Blue Shield Association disagrees. (Cassidy also says in that same interview that his bill would work through the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which…

"We are by no means through this disaster" - Gulf Coast fishing community searches for some certainty

by Elizabeth Grossman "After three long months of oil geysering continuously from the depths of the Gulf, a temporary cap has stemmed the flow and it appears that the well is on its way to being killed. But we are by no means through this disaster," said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in his opening remarks at the August 4th Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on the use of oil dispersants in the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Gulf Coast fishermen and others whose livelihoods depend on the Gulf of Mexico's sea life know this all too well. While the scientists testifying…

Doubt is Their Product - Early Reviews are In

My book Doubt is Their Product: How Industryâs Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (Oxford University Press, 2008 ) will be officially released May 1st (though itâs available now through Amazon and Powellâs), and I'll be writing and speaking more about it over the next several weeks. The book reports on the way scientists working for "product defense" consulting firms manufacture uncertainty in order to help polluters and producers of dangerous products avoid or delay public health and environmental regulation. Iâm fortunate that Doubt is Their Product has already been reviewed by two…

Basics: the death certificate

by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure A couple of days ago we discussed the murky questions surrounding the death of accused anthrax attacker Dr. Bruce Ivins. At the center of stipulating the cause and manner of death were the procedures for filling out the state of Maryland's death certificate by the medical examiner. Determining and recording the cause of death is important for many other things besides the circumstances surrounding the unexplained deaths of anthrax attackers. In the US you can't legally dispose of a body without a properly recorded death certificate and its a document…

Worker Injuries and Painkiller Abuse

The front page of Sunday's Washington Post (Jan. 13) featured the blackened face of coal miner Forest Ramey, 24, but the story was not about a deadly explosion or workers trapped underground.  A Dark Addiction, by the Post's Nick Miroff, gives us a peak into the lives of coal miners who are struggling with painkiller abuse. "Tazewell County, Va.  The crowd is gathering early in the dirt parking lot outside the Clinch Valley Treatment Center, the only methadone clinic within 80 miles.  ...It is 2:45 am...the clinic does not start dosing until 5 am.  ...Many of the patients who fill…

DuPont's "PR" on PFOA Studies

After reviewing previously undisclosed documents*, the Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward writes how a group of notable occupational health scientists and epidemiologists felt DuPont misrepresented the scientific evidence to-date about the health risks associated with PFOA (ammonium perfluorooctanoate, a.k.a. C8).  Ward writes about concerns expressed in private email exchanges among scientists on the firm's Epidemiology Review Board (ERB), an independent and external committee, when DuPont made a big public announcement (and to its employees at the Washington Works plant (near…

Anti-GMO study is appropriately dismissed as biased, poorly-performed

The anti-GMO study released late last week has raised so many bad science red flags that I'm losing count. Orac and Steve Novella have both discussed fatal flaws in the research, the New Scientist discussed the researchers' historical behavior of inflating insignificant results to hysterical headlines. And all this new paper seems to be proof of is that these researchers have become more savvy at manipulating press coverage. The result of this clever manipulation of the press embargo and news-release stenography by the press is predictable. The internet food crackpot army has a bogus…

Detoxification--the pinnacle of quackery

In another fit of sloth, I am migrating one of my favorites over from my old blog. If you haven't read it, it's new to you! --PalMD Many of my patients ask me about it; the TV is full of ads for it; you can't avoid it. "Detoxification" is apparently the pinnacle of modern health care, if you believe folks like Joseph Mercola and Gary Null, and the dozens of adds on late-night TV. For me to explain to you why even the very idea is laughable, I have to teach you a bit of human biochemistry---just a little, I promise. My scientific readers will find this grossly oversimplified, but hopefully…

Creationists are idiots - Part 8,246,532

I've largely been ignoring their stupid lately. But the sheer idiocy of a ID "mathematician" Granville Sewell takes the cake for this truly idiotic straw-man argument. It starts with an interesting question though: I speculated on what would happen if we constructed a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics (the gravitational and electromagnetic forces and the strong and weak nuclear forces) would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet. If we…

ST398 carriage and infections in farmers, United States

I've been working on livestock-associated Staphylococcus aureus and farming now for almost a decade. In that time, work from my lab has shown that, first, the "livestock-associated" strain of methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) that was found originally in Europe and then in Canada, ST398, is in the United States in pigs and farmers; that it's present here in raw meat products; that "LA" S. aureus can be found not only in the agriculture-intensive Midwest, but also in tiny pig states like Connecticut. With collaborators, we've also shown that ST398 can be found in unexpected places, like…

Is Chagas Disease Really The New AIDS Of The Americas?

This is the seventh of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Joshua Pikora. Recently an article published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases titled Chagas Disease: “The New HIV/AIDS of the Americas” caused a stir in the media receiving coverage through Fox News and The New York Times among others.  This article, as the title indicates, claims that Chagas disease is the new AIDS of the Americas and likens the current situation of Chagas disease to that of the first two decades of the AIDS epidemic, but is that truly the case1?  The argument that I gained from the article is that the early…

Grand Rounds 3.42

Welcome to Aetiology and this week's edition of Grand Rounds. It's my pleasure to host this carnival for a second time, and I greatly appreciate all of you who sent along submissions for today's round-up. I want to start by briefly mentioning what looks to be an excellent new source, especially for those of us who do a lot of lecturing and are always looking for good images. Via John at Stranger Fruit I found that Wellcome has released a gallery of medical images to the public. I'm featuring a few below, but the site is worth a browse when you have a few extra minutes. So, without…

Did They All Die in Vain?

The Mountain Eagle's Tom Bethell pulls no punches in today's editorial with an  in-your-face critique of the coal industry and their investment (not!) in safety technology.  He writes: "Name five U.S. coal companies that have generously supported research to develop a two-way PED, hardened wireless two-way phone systems, and a tracking system capable of instantly locating miners. You canât, because none has." "Worse yet, the coal industry isnât spending a dime to help undercapitalized entrepreneurs move their promising products from bench-testing to mine-testing and then through the final…

OSHA Blames Inaction on Uncertainty

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 country. Now, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Edwin G. Foulke Jr. is out there defending OSHAâs record issuing standards that protect worker health and safety. Unfortunately, Mr. Foulke's arguments are reminiscent of the climate change deniers who oppose government…

Dog Tails, Canaries and a Diesel Ruleâs âIllegitimate Birthâ

Mining companies opposed to a health standard to protect underground miners from diesel particulate matter (DPM) finally had their day in court.  The morning proceeding featured remarks about tail-wagging dogs and coal-mine canaries, presented before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.  Industry attorneys urged the Court to vacate the exposure limits and other provisions of the Mine Safety and Health Administrationâs (MSHA) 2001 DPM rule.  From my vantage point sitting on the public gallery benches, Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsberg, Senior Judge Harry T.…

Autism Crankery at Huffpo - Again

RFK Jr. writes the standard crank screed in Huffpo, and it's like a mirror reflection of the CBS news crankery that Orac takes on. Let's see, it's a crank screed so it at a very minimum has to have four elements. The wacky idea, a bunch of inflated non-evidence, conspiracy theories to deflect criticism, and finally, notions of persecution. Let's see how RFK Jr. does. The poisonous public attacks on Katie Wright this week--for revealing that her autistic son Christian (grandson of NBC Chair Bob Wright), has recovered significant function after chelation treatments to remove mercury --…

The Pogeyan, a new mystery cat

I've pretty much given up on TV. I occasionally watch a few things (The IT Crowd, Doctor Who, QI, Never Mind the Buzzcocks), but mostly it's all shit and I'd be very happy to not have a TV at all. Once in a blue moon, however, there is something really good. On Friday evening (Jan 16th), BBC 2 screened 'The Mountains of the Monsoon' as part of its The Natural World series. This featured wildlife photographer and environmentalist Sandesh Kadur as he travelled about the Western Ghats in quest of wildlife. The Western Ghats evidently has some awesome wildlife. There are dholes, tigers,…

Pathological Programming: Ignorance is Bliss, or at least control.

Todays dose of pathology is another masterpiece from the mangled mind of Chris Pressey. It's called "[Version](http://catseye.mine.nu:8080/projects/version/)", for no particularly good reason. It's a wonderfully simple language: there's only *one* actual kind of statement: the labelled assignment. Every statement is of the form: "*label*: *var* = *value*". But like last's weeks monstrosity, Smith, Version is a language that doesn't really have any flow control. But instead of copying instructions the Smith way, in Version the program is toroidal: it executes all statements in sequence, and…

The Genius of Alonzo Church (rerun)

I'm on vacation this week, so I'm posting reruns of some of the better articles from when Goodmath/Badmath was on Blogger. Todays is a combination of two short posts on numbers and control booleans in λ calculus. So, now, time to move on to doing interesting stuff with lambda calculus. To start with, for convenience, I'll introduce a bit of syntactic sugar to let us name functions. This will make things easier to read as we get to complicated stuff. To introduce a *global* function (that is a function that we'll use throughout our lambda calculus introduction without including its declaration…

Mocking a Silly Anti-Relativity Rant

I was reading an article on Slashdot the other day about a recent discovery of what might be a MECO. A [MECO][wiki-meco] is a "magnetospheric eternally collapsing object"; if this were true, it would be a big deal because according to relativity, either black holes exist and MECOs don't, or MECOs exist and black holes don't. I have no intention of getting into the MECO vs. black hole argument. But a commenter there put down a link to something that he seemed to think was a [reasonable argument against relativity][nastytruth]. I took a look, and it's just *hysterically* funny. The author of…

Nutty Numerology and Stonehenge

As readers of GM/BM at the old site know, one of the things that I love to shred is trashy numerology. I also have a great dislike for the tendency of many modern pseudo-researchers to insist that ancient people were hopelessly naive or stupid. I've found a delightful little article about Stonehenge that combines these two themes. Stonehenge is quite an interesting construct. To the best of our knowledge, it was a sort of observatory: the patterns of stones and their arrangement are structured to allow a number of astronomical observations and predictions of astronomical events. This is a…

"What was that cute little Mexican snake?", and other musings...

That cute little Mexican snake was, obviously, a 'colubrid'. That means, essentially, that it's a colubroid snake that isn't a viperid, elapid, or a member of any of the other obviously distinct colubroid clades (more on this matter below). Its small size, short-snouted, wide head and proportionally enormous eyes at least suggest that it's a juvenile. The fact that it was photographed in Mexico, and in a region of scrubland and desert, helps narrow down the possible identities. I initially thought it was a lyre snake (Trimorphodon): they tend to have a light grey ground colour, dark grey/…

Birdbooker Report 120

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I'll have a long beard by the time I read them. ~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books. The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…

How to build a dinosaur

I've been reading a new book by Jack Horner and James Gorman, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I was pleasantly surprised. It's a book that gives a taste of the joys of geology and paleontology, talks at some length about a recent scientific controversy, acknowledges the importance of evo-devo, and will easily tap into the vast mad scientist market. It is a little scattered, in that it seems to be the loosely assembled concatenation of a couple of books, but that's part of the appeal; read the chapters like you would a collection of…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 16 new articles in PLoS ONE today (as well as 13 last night and 5 on Friday night). 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: Darwin's Manufactory Hypothesis Is Confirmed and Predicts the Extinction Risk of Extant Birds: In the Origin of Species Darwin hypothesized that the "manufactory" of…

Why Is Academia Liberal?

When I posted this originally (here and here) I quoted a much longer excerpt from the cited Chronicle article than what is deemed appropriate, so this time I urge you to actually go and read it first and then come back to read my response. From Dr.Munger's blog, an interesting article: Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual By MARK BAUERLEIN, The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 12, Page B6 (that link is now dead, but you can find a copy here): Hmmmm, why was the poll conducted only in social science departments (e.g., sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, anthropology, perhaps…

Information vs. Knowledge vs. Expertise

There is an interesting post (and comment thread) on Kevin Kelly's blog about the exponential growth of available information. It is quite thought-provoking, but there are a couple of issues I have with it. First issue is that Kevin took the old adage that "every answer leads to at least two new questions", perhaps tongue-in-cheek (I hope), as if it was true: Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More answers, more questions. Telescopes and microscopes expanded not only what we knew, but what we didn't know. They allowed us to spy into our…

A major change in stem cell policy

Today, President Obama signed a bill lifting the Bush restrictions on stem cell research. You really must go listen to his speech on the occasion — he seems to get what scientific research is all about. Man, it's been a long eight years, and oh is it wonderfully good to hear an eloquent defense of scientific research from our president, for a change. The ugly little goblins of the Bush years still plague us, though; compare the uplifting message of knowledge from Obama with this fundamentally fallacious opinion piece from the carnie barker of junk science, Steven Milloy. And by "fundamentally…

Old fossil "disproves" Darwin!

The old fossil is Pat Buchanan, who has published a freakishly antiquated diatribe against Darwin. It's extremely old school — he uses arguments straight out of 1960s era "scientific creationism", trying to tar Darwin with guilt by association with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. He is apparently inspired by a "splendid little book," The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold, by a creationist crank named Eugene G. Windchy. You can get an idea of Windchy's level of scholarship by this quote: That Darwinism has proven "disastrous theory" is indisputable. "…

No genes were lost in the making of this whale

I just learned (via John Lynch) about a paper on cetacean limbs that combines developmental biology and paleontology, and makes a lovely argument about the mechanisms behind the evolution of whale morphology. It is an analysis of the molecular determinants of limb formation in modern dolphins, coupled to a comparison of fossil whale limbs, and a reasonable inference about the pattern of change that was responsible for their evolution. One important point I'd like to make is that even though what we see in the morphology is a pattern of loss—whale hindlimbs show a historical progression over…

Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush

Liberal media, my ass! If you believe that the majority of the mainstream media (MSM) is a bastion of "liberal" reporting, then you need to open your mind and read Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush by Eric Boehlert (New York: Free Press, 2006). In this book, the author examines the press coverage of the Bush administration during that turbulent year between September 2004 and September 2005. Boehlert is an award-winning journalist who researches and writes extensively about media, politics and pop culture, and is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. In Lapdogs, he unflinchingly…

Another creationist gomer in a local paper

Even here in Minnesota, we get creationists ranting in the newspapers. This one is in the Brainerd Dispatch. In response to a previous writer's statement " ... modern neo-Darwinian synthesis of organic evolution is supported by more compelling and intellectually satisfying empirical evidence that any other idea ever advanced by the world's scientific community ... " The retort to this statement is simple: hogwash! Remember, the neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is not "change over time" or "modifications through natural selection within an existing species", nor dynamics of cellular…

The Mismeasurement of Science

tags: researchblogging.org, H-index, impact numbers, scientific journals A friend, Ian, emailed an opinion paper that lamented the state of scientific research and the effect this has had on science itself. In this paper, by Peter A. Lawrence, a Professor of Zoology at University of Cambridge, the main point is that modern science, particularly biomedicine, is being damaged by attempts to measure the quality and quantity of research being produced by individual scientists. Worse, as this system careened out of control, it gave rise to a new and more damaging trend: ranking scientists…

The Lost World of James Smithson

tags: book review, history, biography, James Smithson, Jacques Louis Macie, Smithsonian Institution, Heather Ewing As a nearly life-long resident of the West Coast, I have visited the Smithsonian Institution exactly once in my entire life, and to be honest, I didn't notice the bust of its founder, James Smithson. I suppose I should feel guilty about that but, according to what I have read, his bust is located across the street from the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall. At that time, this area was not included in my Smithsonian-seeking trajectory. However, after visiting the Smithsonian…

Worst Hard Time

What do you think of when you hear the phrase, "Dust Bowl"? Like most people, I learned about the Dust Bowl in my high school history class. But even though I attended high school last century (iieee!), as I recall, my textbook devoted perhaps one paragraph to this event before moving on to other, more important events, such as the stock market crash and the banking failure, the Great Depression, Roosevelt's New Deal, and World War II. In fact, except for my astonished sadness after reading John Steinbeck's literary rant, The Grapes of Wrath, I never gave the actual event much thought.…

the arrogance of the privileged

NASA admin Mike Griffin noted that deciding the current climate is the best is a rather arrogant position. Ok, there is a point there. But, we're making a choice whether we like it or not, so what should we choose?. Not choosing is also a choice, and one no less arrogant. The preindustrial mean atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was about 275 ppm, plus or minus maybe 5%, with rare intermittent spikes which drew down rapidly, probably due to volcanic injections followed by oceanic and biospheric re-equilibrium. The current concentration just went over 375 ppm and is trending inexorably…

Do you believe in evolution ... and why?

Greetings, fellow minions. Sastra OM, here, belatedly logging in as guest blogger #4. My smooth entry into the blogosphere was temporarily delayed by my fierce objections to signing Seed's contract, which to my horror appeared to involve some sort of ritualized Cthulhu chanting to the Elder Gods. Turns out it simply needed reformatting. My bad. Unlike some of the other guest bloggers this week, I do NOT have a strong background in biology and impressive credentials from prestigious universities and research labs. Instead, I have a BA in English Lit from Western Illinois University (everybody…

Decadal Survey: 2010

Decadal eTownhall meeting is about to start, and apparently some astronomy departments "forgot" to sign up for a webcast slot, so, like modern finance, those of us with the millisecond time advantage will leverage the advantage. For the rest, here is the liveblog of the webcast, or find a tweet with no delay (Derek is tweeting). First question, no doubt, will be: "Roger, WHO chose the Muzak for the people waiting on hold...?" and we're off... apparently proceeds of the popcorn sales at the webcast sites will fund the new projects... hah! Oh, that was not a joke. We start off by emphasizing…

will they come?

Academic term will start soon here, just in time for football season. Enrollment is high, due to demographic and economic factors, but, with the slowly developing funding crunch, will the students actually show up and register? Enrollment in institutions of higher education, in the US, is very high right now, due primarily to demographics- the echo of the baby boom is passing through the lucrative 18-22 phase - but also because of higher participation rate and because times are hard. It is rational for people to defer entering the job market and take on the direct and opportunity cost of…

What Bugged the Dinosaurs? Insects, Disease, and Death in the Cretaceous

tags: What Bugged the Dinosaurs?, dinosaurs, insects, disease, George Poinar, Roberta Poinar, book review I grew up with a fondness for dinosaurs. Their unbelievable size, their peculiar shapes, and their undeniable absence from the world as I knew it were all sources of fascination. But never once did I think of the dinosaurs as being plagued by biting insects and other blood-sucking arthropods; mosquitoes, flies, ticks and mites were creatures that haunted camping trips, picnics and attics, not the majestic dinosaurs! But according to the new book, What Bugged the Dinosaurs? Insects,…

Cats, cheezburgers and zombies: The new (and awesome) public health

by Kim Krisberg Funny cats and disaster preparedness. It's a marriage made in Internet heaven. "Cats are all over the Internet," says Michele Late, coordinator of the American Public Health Association's (APHA) Cat Preparedness Photo Contest. "And if cats are what people want, then marrying them with emergency preparedness seems like a smart fit." Launched just after Labor Day weekend, APHA's cat photo contest takes its inspiration from the enormous popularity of an Internet meme known as LOLcats, in which — yep, you guessed it — people take funny photos of cats and photoshop them with funny…

Healthy behaviors and where the money goes

Via Ezra Klein, here's a striking infographic from the Bipartisan Policy Center comparing what makes us healthy to how we as a nation spend our health dollars: Infographic from the Bipartisan Policy Center As it illustrates, behaviors are major contributors to our health status, but a tiny fraction of US health spending goes to encouraging healthy behaviors like physical activity. The Bipartisan Policy Center report Lots to Lose: How America's Health and Obesity Crisis Threatens our Economic Future offers several recommendations for improving nutrition and physical activity in the US. In…

Work hours, sleep, and safety

National Sleep Awareness Week might have been last week, but many of us are feeling the importance of shuteye this week, as we struggle to drag ourselves out of bed at what feels like an inappropriate hour. While Daylight Saving Time may get the blame for sleepiness this week, though, there are important year-round factors that cause fatigue. In honor of National Sleep Awareness Week, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's NIOSH Science Blog published two posts about the impact of work demands on sleep. Claire Caruso and Roger Rosa start off by highlighting the…

OSHA cracks down (sometimes) on worker deaths in grain elevators

Monique Harper, 41, had a beautiful smile that family and friends will never forget. "Monique was the most hilarious and free-spirited person you will ever meet," said one of her sisters. "She was a mother that loved her children, family and friends." Monique Harper's contagious smile and free spirit are now only memories. She was one of the 26 U.S. workers killed in 2010 after being engulfed in grain at storage facilities that hold billions of bushels of harvested corn, soybeans, wheat, barley, and rice. Another 25 workers in 2010 were trapped in grain, but were rescued. Entrapments and…

Samsung Denies Worker Rights - and Worker Health - in South Korea

New Solutions: The Drawing Board is a monthly feature produced by the journal New Solutions. Read more about it here. By Charles Levenstein and Dominick Tuminaro [In press, International Union Rights journal, volume 17(4), due out 20 December; posted with permission] There is an important intersection between the movements for international trade union rights and worker health and safety. Both recognize that core trade union rights are also human rights. On April 2, 2010, Ji-Yeon Park, a 23 year old former worker at a Samsung factory in South Korea, was buried, the victim of a blood cancer…

Feeding the Hungry Cities: Backyard Chickens, Rooftop Gardens, and Vertical Farming

As I mentioned yesterday, Sharon Astyk of Casaubon's Book and I are spending this week focusing on urbanization issues. Sharon is a farmer and has been writing for a long time about sustainable food production, particularly as it relates to climate change and a dwindling supply of fossil fuels. In her post yesterday, she linked to some of her past writing about urban issues, and the theme that ties them together is rural-urban collaboration. Cities can't grow enough food to feed all their residents, and rural areas need the durable goods that cities produce, so a reciprocal relationship is…

No justice for Steven Lillicrap, 21, killed at work while dismantling a crane

Steven Lillicrap, 21, started his shift at about 7:30 am on a cold Feb 3, 2009 at a construction site near St. Louis, Missouri. He was an apprentice Operating Engineer and this was his first big assignment. He would be working with more experienced men to dismantle a 100-ton crawler crane. The crew was in a hurry because the company, Ben Hur Construction, Inc., needed the crane that day at another job site. (The firm runs 15-20 projects at a time.) Within a couple of hours, Steven Lillicrap was dead. He suffered chest crushing injuries when the safety lanyard he was wearing got caught…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At ProPublica, Michael Grabell investigates how U.S. companies take advantage of immigrant workers, focusing on Case Farms poultry plants, which former OSHA chief David Michaels once described as “an outrageously dangerous place to work.” He reports that Case Farms built its business by recruiting some of the world’s most vulnerable immigrants, who often end up working in the kind of dangerous and abusive conditions that few Americans would put up with. Grabell chronicles the history of Case Farms and how it first began recruiting refugees from Guatemala who were fleeing a brutal civil war in…

Haiti sees surge in cholera cases after Hurricane Matthew; UN admits moral responsibility

Months after a severe earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, UN peacekeeping troops exacerbated Haitians’ suffering by introducing cholera to the country, via waste that leaked from a UN housing base into the Artibonite river. The disease sickened 800,000 people and killed more than 9,000 – although a study at four sites in northern Haiti found the actual death toll could be substantially higher than the official count. In August 2016, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon acknowledged the UN’s role in Haiti’s cholera epidemic, accepting moral but not legal responsibility. The UN was working to…