government
kkrisberg | February 12, 2016Manufacturers who market their products as “BPA-free” aren’t just sending consumers a message about chemical composition. The underlying message is about safety — as in, this product is safe or least more safe than products that do contain BPA. However earlier this month, another study found that a common BPA alternative — BPS — may not be safer at all.
“BPS works very similarly to BPA,” said Nancy Wayne, a reproductive endocrinologist and professor of physiology at the University of California-Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine. “We’re not the first to show this, but what’s captured…
kkrisberg | February 10, 2016President Obama released his 2017 federal budget proposal yesterday, recommending funding boosts for a number of public health priorities. And even though his presidency is coming to an end and so this budget is probably dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Congress, it’s worth a peek inside.
Here are some of the highlights that seem particularly relevant to public health, health care and working families:
Health care access: The Obama budget would expand federal financing to cover the costs of state Medicaid eligibility expansions. That means the federal government would fully cover…
kkrisberg | February 5, 2016For public health workers, it’s no surprise that social, economic and political conditions shape the distribution and burden of disease. They’ve always known that it takes much more than medicine to keep people healthy. Still, when public health scientist Kristina Talbert-Slagle decided to study the impact of social and public health spending on HIV/AIDS, she wasn’t sure what she’d uncover.
“We thought that maybe there would be a connection, but we didn’t really know what to expect,” said Talbert-Slagle, a senior scientific officer at the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute and a lecturer…
kkrisberg | February 2, 2016At NPR, reporter Howard Berkes writes about the failure of federal laws to protect workers who are left out of the workers’ compensation system. He begins his story with Kevin Schiller, a building engineer for Macy’s department stores for more than two decades. While working in a storage room in a Macy’s in Denton, Texas, a mannequin fell from 12 feet above, hitting Schiller and forcing him to hit his head on a shelf and then the concrete floor. Berkes writes:
Schiller has hardly worked since, given persistent headaches, memory loss, disorientation and extreme sensitivity to bright light and…
kkrisberg | January 29, 2016In the midst of another national debate over gun safety regulations, some argue that higher rates of gun ownership will protect people from dangerous strangers with deadly intentions. Physician and public health researcher Michael Siegel set out to study that argument. He ultimately found no relationship between gun ownership and stranger-related firearm homicides. But he did find that gun ownership levels translated into higher homicide risks for one group in particular — women.
“Our data refute the hypothesis that the more guns out there, the more of a deterrent there is to strangers…
kkrisberg | January 28, 2016Each year, the U.S. spends $26.2 billion on costs associated with preterm birth — that’s birth before 37 weeks of pregnancy. Beyond the costs, babies born too early experience immediate and long-term problems, from developmental disabilities to asthma to hearing loss. For years, scientists have been studying possible environmental contributors, with many finding an association between preterm birth and air pollution. Earlier this week, a new study brought even more depth and clarity to this connection.
Published in the journal Environmental Health, the study found that exposure to high levels…
cmonforton | January 26, 2016A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (MSHA) regulation which is designed to better protect coal miners from developing black lung disease. The MSHA regulation was issued in April 2014, and shortly thereafter, the National Mining Association, Murray Energy, and others filed a lawsuit against it. The judges' opinion was published yesterday. (Thanks to Evan B. Smith at Devil in the Dust for alerting me to the decision.)
The industry asked the Court of Appeals to review a long list of legal arguments against the…
kkrisberg | January 19, 2016At Reveal, reporter Will Evans investigates discrimination within temporary staffing agencies, finding a pattern of racial, sexist and otherwise discriminatory hiring practices. He begins his story with Alabama-based Automation Personnel Services Inc., writing:
When its clients wanted to hire temp workers based on race, sex or age, Automation was happy to oblige, according to dozens of former employees.
Often, the practice was blatant. A manager at a Georgia manufacturing plant asked Christie Ragland not to send him “any black thugs,” she said. Ragland, a former Automation office manager…
kkrisberg | January 18, 2016Think about all the objects you use every day that are made with pieces of metal. Before that object got to you, a worker in the metal manufacturing industry used a machine to cut, saw, bend and assemble the metal pieces into the countless products that make our lives easier. But sometimes those machines break. And when they do, a simple and inexpensive procedure helps ensure both worker and machine can return safely to the job.
The procedure is known as lockout/tagout (LOTO) and it’s used to disable machinery and prevent the release of hazardous energy during servicing and repair. In other…
cmonforton | January 13, 2016Justin “J.D.” Jorgensen, 30 suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Wednesday, January 6 while working at an excavation project in Altoona, IA. His employer was JRS Excavating. WHOTV reports:
the project was in a residential area where workers were “digging water and sewer lines.”
the incident occurred about 8 am local time.
an Altoona police spokesperson said that Mr. Jorgensen was working inside a trench that was “10 to 12 feet deep” and the “dirt caved in.”
"family friends say he worked with his brother.”
Using OSHA’s on-line database, it does not appear that Iowa OSHA has conducted any…
kkrisberg | January 8, 2016These days, there’s a lot of attention on finding new and creative ways to turn around the nation’s opioid abuse and overdose problem. And it’s attention that’s very much needed because the problem is only getting worse.
On the first day of 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published new data on prescription drug and opioid overdose deaths, reporting that more people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2014 than during any other year on record. In fact, during 2014, there were about one-and-a-half more drug overdose deaths than deaths from traffic crashes, with most of…
cmonforton | January 7, 2016**Update below (1/30/2016)
A new paper by NIOSH researchers explores the use of lung transplants for individuals with work-related pneumoconiosis, including black lung disease. Using data from the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) for the period 1996-2014, Blackley and colleagues identified 47 lung-transplant cases in which the patient’s primary diagnosis was “coal workers’ pneumoconiosis” or pneumoconiosis unspecified.” Thirty four of the lung transplants (72%) were performed since 2008.
The medical costs for a bilateral lung transplant are substantial. In 2014, the average cost of…
lborkowski | January 6, 2016Gerald Lyle Thompson’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of Minnesota OSHA (MN-OSHA) in the agency’s citations against his employer, DSM Excavating.
The 51 year-old was working in June 2015 at a construction site for Ryland Homes in Lakeville, Minnesota. The initial press reports indicated that Thompson and his brother were installing drain tile inside a 6 to 8 foot deep trench. Thompson was trapped at the bottom of the trench when the soil collapsed onto him. I wrote about the incident shortly after it occurred.
Inspectors with MN-OSHA conducted an…
kkrisberg | January 5, 2016At ProPublica, Michael Grabell expanded his “Insult to Injury” series on the dismantling of the nation’s workers’ compensation system with a disturbing look inside what he dubs the “workers’ comp industrial complex.” He begins his story in Las Vegas at the National Workers’ Compensation and Disability Conference & Expo. And even though Grabell’s previous investigations exposed just how much injured workers must struggle to receive fair compensation and medical care, he details a conference draped in luxury and expense. He writes:
A scantily clad acrobat dangles from the ceiling,…
lborkowski | December 31, 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 July 27, 2015:
by Celeste Monforton, DrPH, MPH
The occupational health community, coal miners, their families and labor advocates are mourning the loss of physician Donald Rasmussen, 87.
For more than 50 years, he diagnosed and treated coal miners with work-related lung disease, first at the then Miners Memorial Hospital in Beckley, WV and later at his own black lung clinic. A lengthy story by John Blankenship…
lborkowski | December 28, 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 May 27, 2015:
by Kim Krisberg
For more than a decade, biologist Mariam Barlow has been working on the theory that administering antibiotics on a rotating basis could be a solution to antibiotic resistance. After years of research, Barlow had lots of data, but she needed a more precise way to make sense of it all — something that was so specific it could easily be used to treat patients. So, she joined forces…
lborkowski | December 24, 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 which was originally posted on May 26, 2015:
by Kim Krisberg
After 18 years as a professional house cleaner in the suburbs of Chicago, Magdalena Zylinska says she feels very lucky. Unlike many of her fellow domestic workers, she hasn’t sustained any serious injuries.
Zylinska, 43, cleans residences in the metropolitan Chicago area five days a week. An independent contractor, she cleans two to three houses each day. Fortunately, she…
kkrisberg | December 22, 2015At the Center for Public Integrity, reporters Jim Morris and Maryam Jameel investigate the nation’s “third wave” of asbestos-related disease. The story begins with two photos of Kris Penny, who used to install fiber-optic cable beneath the streets of Florida.
The first photo is of Penny in April 2015, looking healthy and happy. The next photo is one taken just six months later. Penny looks dramatically transformed after being diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma, a rare cancer of the abdominal lining that’s nearly always related to asbestos exposure. After talking with a lawyer, Penny…
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…