Environmental health
lborkowski | December 29, 2015During the holiday season, Kim, Liz and I are taking a short break from blogging. We are posting some of our favorite posts from the past year. Here’s one of them, originally posted on March 16, 2015:
by Liz Borkowski, MPH
In 2003, the city of London took a dramatic step in the battle against traffic congestion: It implemented a congestion charge of £5 for those driving private vehicles into an eight-square-mile central congestion zone on weekdays between 7am and 6:30pm. The fees were increased twice, and since 2011 have stood at £10. Drivers purchase day passes online, and a camera network…
kkrisberg | December 18, 2015Researcher Douglas Wiebe first started studying gun violence as a doctoral student, investigating how having a firearm in one’s home affected the risk of injury. The work only heightened his interest in exploring gun violence from a public health perspective. Eventually, he decided to officially take on a question he’d been mulling over for almost a decade: Among people who’ve experienced a violent assault, are there any commonalities in their experiences just prior to the incident, and can we map those experiences in a way that reveals optimal intervention opportunities?
“I wanted to do a…
kkrisberg | December 16, 2015In a recent study, Harvard public health researchers decided to test a few dozen types of electronic cigarettes for diacetyl, a flavoring chemical associated with a severe respiratory disease known as “popcorn lung.” The researchers found diacetyl in a majority of the e-cigarettes they tested. News outlets jumped on the findings, with some announcing that e-cigarettes could cause the often-debilitating respiratory disease.
But scientist Joseph Allen wants to be clear: His study doesn’t make a definitive statement about the effect of diacetyl in e-cigarettes. Instead, Allen said his goal was…
kkrisberg | December 9, 2015As world leaders are gathered in Paris to discuss international efforts to combat climate change, Michelle Chen writes that workers in the Global South will “need to build livelihoods that can mitigate ecological crisis — and leap ahead of the dominant fossil-fuel based economies, which historically have both controlled and stifled their development.” Reporting for The Nation, Chen starts her article with a report from the New Delhi-based Just Jobs Network, which notes that climate-driven migration has the potential to drive down wages and working conditions in urban areas. Chen writes:
But…
cmonforton | November 3, 2015Kim Krisberg and I are with our public health colleagues this week at the 143rd annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Thousands of researchers, practitioners, and advocates from across the U.S. and the globe have gathered in Chicago to swap best practices, share new science and organize for healthier communities. Here are some highlights from yesterday’s events courtesy of the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
The tipping point: On our way to reducing gun violence: Public health advocates can agree that shootings are a huge health issue for the more than 33,000 victims of…
kkrisberg | October 21, 2015Flame retardants aren’t just found in your furniture. It’s likely you also have detectable amounts of the chemical in your body too, which is pretty worrisome considering the growing amount of research connecting flame retardants to serious health risks. Researchers have linked to the chemicals to reproductive health problems, adverse neurobehavioral development in kids, and endocrine and thyroid disruption. And so the question arises: Do the risks of today’s flame retardants outweigh the benefits?
Chemical engineer Christopher Ellison, an associate professor in the University of Texas-Austin…
cmonforton | September 30, 2015I’m still shaking my head and asking out loud, “what were they thinking?” Am I getting this right?: Volkswagen installed software so its diesel-polluting vehicles would deceive EPA-mandated emissions tests. And buyers of the vehicles were deceived by Volkswagen. The company led them to believe they could get a car with power, performance, high miles per gallon, and “clean diesel,” while not suffering from sticker shock.
What those owners and the rest of us didn’t know was the price we were paying in terms of public health. Brad Plumer at Vox offers a back-of-the-envelope estimate on the air…
kkrisberg | September 25, 2015The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers it one of five neglected parasitic infections in need of targeted public health action. And while its transmission is still considered rare in the U.S., it seems residents of Texas may be at greater risk than scientists previously thought.
The disease is American Trypanosomiasis, more commonly known as Chagas disease. Chagas is a vector-borne disease in which the parasite is transmitted to animals and people by blood-sucking insects known as “assassin bugs” or “kissing bugs” (here’s what the bugs look like). However, the parasite isn’t…
kkrisberg | September 23, 2015For years, scientists have described climate change as a slowly emerging public health crisis. But for many, it’s difficult to imagine how a complex planetary phenomenon can impact personal well-being beyond the obvious effects of natural disasters, which climatologists say will happen more frequently and intensely as the world warms. That disconnect is what piqued my interest in a new study on old infrastructure, heavy rainfalls and spikes in human illness.
Drinking water quality is among the many adverse effects that climate change is expected to have on human health. But what exactly does…
kkrisberg | August 18, 2015The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration is no stranger to budget cuts — the agency is already so underfunded that it would take its inspectors nearly a century, on average, to visit every U.S. workplace at least once. In some states, it would take two centuries. Unfortunately, appropriations bills now making their way through Congress don’t bode much better for OSHA.
Earlier this month, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) and Public Citizen, along with 74 fellow organizations that care about worker health and safety, sent a letter to…
kkrisberg | July 31, 2015Superstorm Sandy came ashore nearly three years ago, pummeling the New England and Mid-Atlantic coast and becoming one of the deadliest and costliest storms to ever hit the U.S. This week, the Sandy Child and Family Health Study released two new reports finding that the health impacts of Sandy continue to linger, illustrating the deep mental footprint left by catastrophic disasters and the challenges of long-term recovery.
Led by researchers at Rutgers University and New York University, the Sandy Child and Family Health Study is based on 1,000 face-to-face interviews with adults in the nine…
kkrisberg | July 7, 2015Recycling our garbage is good for the planet, but a new report finds that the workers who process our recyclable materials often face dangerous and unnecessary conditions that put their health and safety at serious risk.
Released in late June, “Sustainable and Safe Recycling: Protecting Workers Who Protect the Planet” chronicles the many hazards that recycling workers encounter on the job as well as ways the recycling industry and local officials can collaborate to improve and ensure worker safety. The report — a collaboration between the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, the…
kkrisberg | June 19, 2015Even though farmworkers face serious hazards on the job and work in one of the most dangerous industries in the country, most young farmworkers in a recent study rated their work safety climate as “poor.” In fact, more than a third of those surveyed said their managers were only interested in getting the job done as quickly as possible.
Recently published in the American Journal of Public Health, the study was designed to capture perceptions of work safety climates on North Carolina farms that employ children and teens and the association with occupational safety and injuries. In partnering…
kkrisberg | June 16, 2015A recent agreement between striking farmworkers and big agribusiness in Baja California could be the “most significant achievement by a farm labor movement in recent Mexican history,” reports Richard Marosi in the Los Angeles Times.
Among the settlement details, daily wages for workers will go up by as much as 50 percent and workers will receive the required government benefits often denied by their employers. Marosi reports:
“This is a watershed moment,” said Sara Lara, a farm labor researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In decades of studying farm issues, Lara said she…
kkrisberg | June 12, 2015The science on the health effects of fracking is still very much emerging. Oftentimes, the growing body of research can’t make a conclusive link between the drilling technique and negative health impacts, but it certainly makes the case that more research is needed. Earlier this month, another study joined the pack.
Published June 3 in the journal PLOS ONE, the study found that women who lived closer to a high density of fracking activity were more likely to have babies with lower birth weights than women living farther away from such drilling activity. The study is the first of its kind to…
cmonforton | May 28, 2015Factory farms in the US---the confinements that house millions of beef cattle, dairy cows, hogs and poultry--- generate enough manure to fill the 102-story Empire State Building each and every day. That's more than 13 times the sewage produced by the US population.
This factoid and many others are presented in Factory Farm Nation 2015, a report released this week by Food & Water Watch (FWW). The report describes the dominance of factory farms in US agriculture and its affect on the physical, economic, and social environment. It provides examples of consolidation within the beef, pork,…
cmonforton | April 30, 2015They’ve called it a failure and a broken law. That’s how the public health community, agency officials, some lawmakers and others have characterized the nearly 40 year old Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). When any of them are looking for a poster child to illustrate why TSCA’s a failure, they most often point to one toxic: asbestos.
EPA tried in 1989 to ban most uses of asbestos. But TSCA is so convoluted that the ban didn't withstand a lawsuit which was brought by producers and users of the deadly mineral fibers. So we are stuck with a law in which one of the most well-researched, and…
kkrisberg | April 27, 2015Today, Maine’s legislature held a hearing on the Toxic Chemicals in the Workplace Act, a proposal to require employers to identify harmful chemicals in the workplace and replace them with safer alternatives. It’s the perfect example of state action on behalf of worker safety and exactly the kind of measure that might no longer be possible under two congressional proposals aimed at overhauling the federal Toxic Substances Control Act.
As Congress considers a number of legislative proposals to reform the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) — a law that hasn’t been updated since its passage…
cmonforton | April 24, 2015Researchers with CDC's National Institute for Occupational (NIOSH) report that nearly 16 percent of current asthma cases in US adults are work-related. The reported findings are based on data from the Behaviorial Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) Adult Asthma Call-back Survey (ACBS) and reported this month in Morbitity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). The survey respondents, made up of adults from 22 states, answered "yes" to the question:
"Have you ever been told by a doctor or other health professional that your asthma was caused by, or your symptoms made worse by, any job you ever…
kkrisberg | April 21, 2015Last November, a roof section larger than a football field collapsed at the Woodgrain Millwork in Prineville, Oregon. Luckily, no one was harmed. However, mill workers, who spoke of a variety of workplace hazards, say they had alerted management to the leaky roof long before the collapse, reported Amanda Peacher for Oregon Public Broadcasting.
In 2004, Woodgrain, a global company with manufacturing facilities across the U.S., bought the 14-acre Prineville mill. Noting that each of the 23 former mill workers interviewed for the story described a “roof riddled with leaks,” Peacher writes:
Peggy…