government
cmonforton | April 6, 2016It’s been six years and one day since 29 men were killed by a coal-dust explosion at former Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine (UBB). Today, U.S. District Judge Irene Berger sentenced the company’s former CEO Don Blankenship for his practices that contributed to the disaster. Berger order him to serve one year in jail and pay a $250,000 penalty.
Early this morning, the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. reported
“…a crowd was already beginning to gather at the Robert C. Byrd U.S. Courthouse in Charleston. More than a dozen family members of the Upper Big Branch miners staked out seats when…
Leaked poll shows business execs overwhelmingly support paid leave, higher wages and fair scheduling
kkrisberg | April 5, 2016You know how opponents of paid sick leave and raising the minimum wage always cite resistance in the business community? Well, in turns out that such resistance might be closer to a marketing gimmick rather than a genuine reflection of employer sentiment.
Yesterday, the Center for Media and Democracy released a leaked internal poll of 1,000 top-level business executives nationwide, many of whom are members of their local or state chambers of commerce. Here’s what the poll, which was commissioned by the Council of State Chambers and conducted by LuntzGlobal, found: 80 percent supported raising…
kkrisberg | April 4, 2016In debates over air pollution control, it’s always a tug-of-war between the cost to business and the cost to public health. Late last month, a study emerged with new data for the public health column: the cost of the nation’s nearly 16,000 annual preterm births linked to air pollution is more than a whopping $5 billion.
Published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the study estimated the burden of U.S. preterm births and related costs associated with fine particulate matter (PM2.5) — a pollutant from motor vehicles and the burning of fuels such as wood and coal. While preterm birth is a…
cmonforton | April 1, 2016I spend a lot of time each March preparing to commemorate Worker Memorial Day on April 28. I end up reading way too many news stories about workers who were killed on-the-job. I search here and there trying to identify the victims by name and figure out the circumstances that contributed to their deaths. Year in and out, one thing is clear: some companies are just plain reckless and they gamble with the lives of their employees.
Reckless business decisions and work-related deaths is the subject of a new manual developed by the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR). "Preventing Death and Injury…
kkrisberg | March 29, 2016At Slate, Michelle Chen writes about the experiences of hotel housekeepers in Miami during spring break. The story starts with Adelle Sile, a housekeeper at the four-star Fontainebleau Miami Beach:
Around this time of year, thanks to the influx of spring break and Easter break vacationers, the time (Sile) has to clean each room during her eight-hour shift gets squeezed as guests stretch their mornings to the final minutes before checkout. When she does finally get in, she sometimes opens the door to find vomit, empty bottles, crack pipes, marijuana buds, and makeshift mattresses of cushions…
cmonforton | March 28, 2016Last Thursday, OSHA announced a new standard to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. Here are some of my favorite quotes and remarks in response to OSHA's news:
“Safety advocates worked for years to get this rule in place. Controlling silica dust is especially important to immigrant workers and other vulnerable groups, who are often assigned the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs on any worksite.” Javier Garcia Hernandez, a construction worker and former consultant for the Philadelphia Area Project on Occupational Safety and Health. (here)
“[Obama] administration…
kkrisberg | March 25, 2016Here’s what states get when they expand Medicaid: more savings, more revenue, more jobs, more access to care for their communities.
That’s the conclusion from a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation issue brief released this month that compared the differences between states that chose to expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act and those that opted out. Under the health reform law, the federal government will pay the entire cost of expanding state Medicaid programs up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level through 2016, phasing down to 90 percent by 2020. It’s a pretty good…
kkrisberg | March 23, 2016A recent study finds vaccine refusals have, indeed, accelerated the resurgence of whooping cough and measles here in the U.S. The findings are making headlines around the country — and comment sections are filling up with vitriol from anti-vaxxers — but it would feel amiss not to highlight the study on a blog dedicated to public health. But first, let’s remind ourselves of the pain and suffering that preceded vaccines.
Here’s a brief snapshot of what life was like before vaccines and what it’s currently like for people without access to these life-saving medicines:
Whooping cough (pertussis…
cmonforton | March 21, 2016OSHA issued a report last week summarizing the agency’s first year of experience with its new severe injury reporting rule. During 2015, employers from 25 states reported to OSHA more than 7,600 incidents in which workers required overnight (or longer) hospitalizations, and suffered nearly 2,650 work-related amputations. The numbers themselves are striking, but something’s more astonishing: before last year, employers weren’t required to report these serious incidents to OSHA. This change may be the biggest overall advance in occupational health and safety in decades.
Without this regulation…
kkrisberg | March 18, 2016In another example of the value of investing in public health, a recent study finds that PulseNet, a national foodborne illness outbreak network, prevents about 276,000 illnesses every year, which translates into savings of $507 million in medical costs and lost productivity. That’s a pretty big return on investment for a system that costs just $7.3 million annually to operate.
Created 20 years ago and coordinated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, PulseNet includes 83 state and federal laboratories and identifies about 1,750 disease clusters every year. It works by linking…
cmonforton | March 17, 2016A funny thing happened this week when President Obama’s regulatory czar, Howard Shelanski, was called to testify before Congress. The subject of the hearing: transparency at Shelanski’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). On the eve of the hearing, OIRA tried to fool us by pretending to be transparent.
For the last several months, I’ve been routinely checking OIRA’s website for notations about meetings the staff has held with individuals or organizations which have an interest in particular pending OSHA regulations. I knew meetings with particular groups had taken place, but…
kkrisberg | March 16, 2016At Vox, Sarah Kliff writes about the side of medical errors we rarely hear about — the doctors and nurses who make such errors and the mental health toll of living with that responsibility. In an article that explores whether health care workers are getting the support they need to deal with such experiences, Kliff begins with the story of nurse Kim Hiatt:
Kim Hiatt had worked as a nurse for 24 years when she made her first medical error: She gave a frail infant 10 times the recommended dosage of a medication. The baby died five days later.
Hiatt's mistake was an unnecessary tragedy. But what…
kkrisberg | March 8, 2016It seems obvious that workers with paid sick leave are more likely to stay home and seek out medical care when they or a family member is ill. But it’s always good to confirm a hunch with some solid data.
In this month’s issue of Health Affairs, researchers used data from the National Health Interview Survey to provide some clarity on the relationship between paid sick leave and health-related behaviors. They found that workers without paid sick leave were three times more likely to forgo medical care than workers who do get paid sick leave. Also, during 2013, both full- and part-time workers…
kkrisberg | March 4, 2016During the years that community health researcher Jill Johnston lived and worked in San Antonio, Texas was experiencing an explosion of fracking. She and the community partners she worked with on environmental health issues had a strong hunch that most of the fracking wastewater wells were being located near communities of color. So, they decided to dig a little deeper and quantify the pattern.
The results of that effort were published this month in the American Journal of Public Health. It turns out that Johnston and her colleagues were right — the study found that fracking wastewater…
kkrisberg | March 3, 2016In the U.S., just a tiny fraction of the chemicals used in consumer products have been tested for human health effects. And with the current climate in Congress, it feels unlikely that we’ll see any true reform of the nation’s terribly outdated chemical safety rules anytime soon. In the meantime, scientist Thomas Hartung may have created the next best thing.
In the simplest terms, Hartung and colleagues took what is the world’s largest and richest database of chemical toxicity research — a database produced in accordance with the European Union’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and…
cmonforton | March 2, 2016Ascencion Molina Medina’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings from South Carolina OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, G M Framing.
The 44 year-old was working in July 2015 at a construction project for a residential and retail development called Main + Stone in Greenville, SC. The general contractor of the Main + Stone development is Yeargin Potter Shackelford Construction.
The initial press reports indicated that Medina had “lost his footing” and fell about 30 feet. I wrote about the incident but, at the time, I did not have the name…
kkrisberg | March 1, 2016At The New York Times, writers Kim Barker and Russ Buettner report on the labor investigations being conducted at nail salons throughout New York in the wake of a 2015 New York Times article that exposed widespread wage and labor abuses. They report that all but a dozen of the 230 salons whose investigations were closed last year were found violating at least one labor law. More than 40 percent of the salons were violating wage laws. Barker and Buettner write:
But the details of the state inspections are perhaps most revealing about just how challenging it is to regulate a largely immigrant-…
lborkowski | February 17, 2016Cross-posted from CPRBlog
by James Goodwin
In case you didn’t get the memo: President Obama is entering the last year of his final term in office, so now we’re all supposed to be panicking over a dreaded phenomenon known as “midnight regulations.” According to legend, midnight rulemaking takes place when outgoing administrations rush out a bunch of regulations during their last few days in order to burnish their legacy or make concrete several of their policy priorities in ways that would be difficult for a successor—presumably from a different party—to undo. The legend further holds that…
kkrisberg | February 16, 2016At In These Times, reporter Joseph Sorrentino writes about the heartbreaking plight of uranium miners and millers as well as the history of uranium mining oversight and regulation. He spent a week interviewing uranium workers and their families in New Mexico — workers who are among the thousands who began working in the mines after 1971 and who don’t qualify for federal compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). Sorrentino writes:
Cipriano Lucero worked in uranium mills from 1977 to 1982. He has pulmonary fibrosis, and one of his kidneys failed when he was 48,…
cmonforton | February 15, 2016A host of failures led to the explosion of fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate (FGAN) at the West Fertilizer Company on April 17, 2013. This disaster led to the death of 15 people. That’s what I heard during the Chemical Safety Board’s (CSB) public meeting on January 28 at which their investigation report was released. I also heard sadness tinted with frustration from a victim of the disaster. She lost someone who was very close in the blast. She sat quietly behind me at the meeting. Her demeanor was private. I’ll call her Theresa.
Like me, Theresa was taking notes on the investigators'…