chemicals policy
cmonforton | August 1, 2013Finally! After far too much hullabaloo about the cost of regulations, there was a U.S. Senate hearing today on why public health regulations are important, and how delays by Congress and the Administration have serious negative consequences for people's lives. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called the hearing entitled "Justice Delayed: The Human Cost of Regulatory Paralysis," the first one conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee's newly created Subcommittee on Oversight, Federal Rights and Agency Action. The witnesses included a parent-turned advocate for automobile safety, AFL-CIO…
cmonforton | July 30, 2013Pilgrim's Pride can't seem to get its act together safely handling highly toxic and explosive gases. The firm---the second largest poultry producer in the world with annual net sales of $8.1 Billion---received citations again from federal OSHA concerning its failed safety management of anhydrous ammonia.
OSHA announced this month $170,000 in proposed penalties for 9 serious, 1 willful and 1 repeat violation at the company's De Queen, Arkansas plant. All of the alleged violations involve requirements under OSHA's process safety management standard for control of highly hazardous chemicals…
egrossman | July 24, 2013On July 15 and 16, about two dozen farmworkers paid an unprecedented visit to Capitol Hill to ask Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the White House to support increased protection from exposure to pesticides. Farmworkers have lobbied Congress before, but this is the first time such a visit focused entirely on pesticide exposure issues, explained Farmworker Justice director of occupational and environmental health, Virginia Ruiz. Farmworkers are asking Congress to support strengthening the EPA’s Worker Protection Standard for pesticides, a regulation that has not been…
cmonforton | July 16, 2013In its short history dating back to 1998, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board has conducted more than 100 investigations of industrial chemical explosions, unplanned toxic releases, spills and other incidents. Some of the disasters made the headlines, such as the 2005 explosion at the BP refinery in Texas City, TX which killed 15 workers, but others garnered much less public attention. Accompanying the CSB's investigation reports are detailed recommendations made to the companies involved, as well as trade associations, consensus standard-setting groups, unions, the US EPA and Occupational…
egrossman | June 26, 2013In 1989, Massachusetts enacted a remarkable and landmark law known as the Toxics Use Reduction Act (TURA). Supported by both environmentalists and industry, and passed unanimously by the state legislature, TURA established toxics use reduction as Massachusetts’ preferred strategy for pollution prevention, and for reducing public, occupational and environmental exposure to hazardous chemicals. The law requires in-state businesses to report on their use of toxic chemicals. It also established programs to support state industries’ toxics use reduction efforts. In the two decades since the bill’s…
lborkowski | June 5, 2013When Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) passed away Monday at the age of 89, the Senate lost one of its longest-serving members and the US lost a public-health champion. Brad Plumer at the Washington Post's Wonkblog describes several of Senator Lautenberg's achievements, including banning smoking on airplanes, preventing people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors from owning guns, and requiring states to raise their drinking ages to 21 and lower the drunk-driving blood alcohol threshold from .10 to .08. The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin writes about Lautenberg's environmental…
cmonforton | May 16, 2013The residents of Battlement Mesa didn't want their "Colorado Dream" ---the community's slogan----to turn into their nightmare. The unincorporated 3,200 acre, residential community offers its 5,000 residents high desert mountain views above the Colorado River, and boasts of opportunities for hiking, birding, golfing, fishing and hunting. But in 2009, Antero Resources identified the Battlement Mesa locale in Garfield County as a proposed site for 200 natural gas wells. That move raised concerns among the residents on how hydrofracking projects might change their way of life. They'd read…
cmonforton | May 8, 2013The rate of work-related fatal injuries in some States is more than three times the national rate of 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers. That's just one disturbing fact contained in the AFL-CIO's annual Death on the Job report which was released this week. In Wyoming, for example, the rate of fatal work-related injuries is 11.6 per 100,000, based on 32 deaths in the State in 2011 (the year for which the most recent data is available.) North Dakota's and Montana's rate is 11.2, based on 44 and 49 deaths, respectively. The rate in Alaska is 11.1, based on 39 deaths. In total, 4,693 workers…
cmonforton | May 1, 2013Steve McGraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), told members of the Texas legislature that responsibility for informing residents about the chemical hazards in their communities----such as at the fertilizer plant in West, Texas----falls to local officials. The Dallas Morning-News' Brandon Formby reports from the first public hearing to examine the circumstances that led to the catastrophic April 17 explosion. The inquiry was held by the Texas Legislature's House Committee on Homeland Security & Public Safety.
“It’s a local up,” DPS Director Steve McCraw said…
cmonforton | April 30, 2013I take mine black, but millions of U.S. coffee drinkers love their java beans flavored to taste like hazelnut, buttered toffee, french toast and amaretto. One supplier in Florida boasts of 47 different flavors. Fans of flavored coffee beans pay a premium for them, but some workers in the bean processing plants are paying a steeper price: their health.
This week's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report describes cases of obliterative bronchiolitis diagnosed in two individuals who worked at a Texas coffee-processing company. Bronchiolitis obliterans is a rare and serious obstructive lung…
egrossman | April 8, 2013By Elizabeth Grossman
An anecdote related in Dan Fagin’s compelling new book, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, that tells the heartbreaking and infuriating history of how chemical industry pollution devastated that New Jersey community, points to one of the biggest flaws in our regulatory system’s approach to protecting people from toxics. In 1986, during a public meeting of the Ocean County Board of Health – Ocean County is home to Toms River, where the Ciba chemical company began manufacturing dye chemicals in the 1950s – an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official…
cmonforton | February 20, 2013From my hometown of Detroit, there's more grim news. The story that made today's headline comes from the State-authorized financial review team. They unanimously concluded that a fiscal emergency exists in Detroit. The city, with a population of about 700,000 residents, has $14 billion in long-term debt and a projected $100 million budget shortfall for this year. The story that didn't get a headline, but is equally important for the city's future, concerns the effects of lead poisoning on academic achievement among Detroit's school children. A newly published study in the American…
lborkowski | February 19, 2013by Kim Krisberg
After nearly three decades as a USDA food safety inspector, Stan Painter tells me he now feels like "window dressing standing at the end of the line as product whizzes by."
Painter, a poultry inspector with the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) stationed in the northeast corner of Alabama in the town of Collinsville, is a first-hand witness to USDA's recently proposed rule to speed up poultry inspection lines while simultaneously reducing the number of federal food inspectors and turning over much of the food safety oversight to plant employees, who could have little…
lborkowski | February 18, 2013Last week, the Center for Public Integrity and PBS released a story that adds another disturbing chapter to the saga of hexavalent chromium (or chromium (VI)), the carcinogenic chemical compound behind the Erin Brockovich story. That story ended with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) paying millions to residents of Hinkley, California, where the company’s operations contaminated local water supplies. In “EPA unaware of industry ties on cancer review panel,” David Heath and Ronnie Green report that this time, the focus is on widespread, low-level chromium contamination; by the…
cmonforton | January 28, 2013Could we have taken action earlier to prevent harm from tobacco, asbestos, and lead? That's the question at the core of the European Environment Agency's (EEA) collection of case studies, which was released this month as Volume 2 "Late lessons from early warnings: science, precaution, innovation."
The publication features articles on those nefarious health hazards, as well as ones about beryllium, Bisphenol A, the pesticides DBCP and DDT, mercury, perchlorethylene, and vinyl chloride. Protecting ecosystem, including aquatic environments exposed to ethinyl oestradiol (synthetic estrogen used…
cmonforton | December 12, 2012A recently published case-control study involving more than 2,100 women in southern Ontario, Canada reported a strong association between being employed in the automotive plastics industry and breast cancer. The researchers recruited the 'case' subjects between 2002-2008 among newly diagnosed breast cancer patients and the randomly-selected controls from the same geographic area. The researchers examined a variety of risk factors for breast cancer (e.g., reproductive history, age) and collected data on the women's employment history. Elevated odds of breast cancer were found among women…
cmonforton | December 10, 2012[Updated 1/5/2013]
[Updated 8/25/2013]
The world's largest labor organization for airline flight attendants--- the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) ---says it took four decades of work, but now its members working in airplane cabins will finally have rights and protections provided by federal OSHA. In an on-line letter to members, the AFA-CWA calls the victory: "OSHA extended to our cabins."
For decades AFA has pursued legal and regulatory solutions to extend OSHA safety and health protections to workers in the airline industry. The roadblocks have been enormous, but our union…
cmonforton | November 5, 2012At 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…
cmonforton | October 23, 2012The pediatrician suspected that something wasn't quite right with the youngster. He'd met the teen as part of his North Philadelphia community health center's psychiatry outreach program. "He was a very nice kid...[but] he had trouble with words, with propositions and ideas," the pediatrician remembered. It made him wonder, "how many of these kids who are coming to the clinic are in fact missed cases of lead poisoning?"
That's the story recalled by Herbert Needleman, MD and shared in 2005 with historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz about the pediatrician's initial inquiries into the…
lborkowski | September 21, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It really is a chemical world, which is bad news for people with asthma.
According to a recent report released in August, at this very moment from where I write, I'm fairly surrounded by objects and materials that contain chemicals that are known or suspected asthmagens — substances that can act as asthma triggers if inhaled. There's formaldehyde (it's in office furniture, wood flooring, curtains and drapes); maleic anhydride (it's in interior paint and tile flooring); hexamethylene diisocyanate (it's in metal storage shelving and decorative metal); and diisodecyl phthalate (…