adult lead poisoning
kkrisberg | August 25, 2017At the Tampa Bay Times, Neil Bedi, Jonathan Capriel, Anastasia Dawson and Kathleen McGrory investigate a June 29 incident at Tampa Electric in which molten ash — commonly referred to as “slag” — escaped from a boiler and poured downed on workers below. Five workers died.
A similar incident occurred at Tampa Electric two decades earlier. If the company had followed the guidelines it devised after that 1997 incident, the five men who died in June would still be alive, the newspaper reported. In particular, the five deaths could have been avoided if the boiler had been turned off before workers…
cmonforton | August 12, 2015“It’s just like the paper we read in class.” That was the email message I received last week from a former undergraduate student from a class I used to teach called "Health and the Environment." She was referring to a report of two young children from the Cincinnati, OH area who were lead poisoned because the toxic metal wasn’t controlled at their father’s workplace. He worked at a facility that recycles electronic waste (e-scrap.)
My former student read about the case in the July 17, 2015 edition of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). The 2 year-old girl and 1 year-old…
kkrisberg | July 19, 2013When I asked Teresa Schnorr why we should be worried about the loss of a little-known occupational health data gathering program, she quoted a popular saying in the field of surveillance: "What gets counted, gets done."
Schnorr, who serves as director of the Division of Surveillance, Hazard Evaluations and Field Studies at CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), was referring to the Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance program (ABLES), a state-based effort that collects and analyzes data on adult lead exposure. For more than two decades, NIOSH has been…