Brazilian Blowout
egrossman | April 11, 2012By Elizabeth Grossman
While the US Supreme Court was debating the Affordable Care Act, the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee Health Subcommittee held a hearing to examine the current federal oversight of cosmetics and personal care product safety. The hearing revealed that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency that oversees the more than eight billion such products now sold annually in the US, knows astonishingly little about these products' ingredients. This data gap - perhaps better described as a data chasm - is compounded by the inadequacy…
lborkowski | April 15, 2011In much of the reporting I've seen on the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the plant workers are an anonymous, if much-praised, group. The New York Times' Hiroko Tabuchi digs deeper to tell us more about who some of these workers are, and what their experiences can tell us about occupational health and safety in Japan. He begins with the story of 55-year-old Masayuki Ishizawa, who was at the plant when the earthquake struck and had to plead with the security guard to be let out the of the complex to flee the tsunami:
Mr. Ishizawa, who was finally allowed to leave, is not a nuclear specialist; he…
lborkowski | December 22, 2010Earlier this month, a bill that would have provided medical benefits and compensation for 9/11 first responders passed the House but couldn't overcome a Republican filibuster. (Remember the old days of majority rule in the Senate, when 51 votes was enough to pass most legislation? We're in a different era now.)
Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer of New York have now made alterations to the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act and hope it will now be able to attract enough Republican votes. The overall cost of the bill has dropped from $7.4 billion to $6.2 billion as a…
lborkowski | October 25, 2010The "Brazilian Blowout" is a popular treatment administered by salons to smooth their clients' hair. The Oregonian's Katy Muldoon explores the experience of one hairstylist who worried about the effects of the chemicals contained in the treatment.
After a few months of administering Brazilian Blowouts, Portland hairstylist Molly Scrutton began experiencing throat and chest pain. When she and salon owner Pauline Steiner called the treatment's distributor, the company refused to tell them what the ingredients were -- so Scrutton decided to stop offering the service. She wrote a memo to her…