Occupational Health & Safety
cmonforton | November 5, 2013The Obama Administration's USDA continues to insist that their proposed rule to "modernize" poultry slaughter inspections will improve food safety. Just last week, Secretary Vilsack's office said it is sticking with their plan, saying:
"comprehensive effort to modernize poultry slaughter inspection in ways that will reduce the risk for American families."
For the last 18 months, however, the USDA Secretary has heard loud and clear that his agency's proposal is certain to do much more harm than good. Advocates for and experts on food safety, workers safety, consumers, animal rights, and even…
egrossman | October 31, 2013According to a new report from the Center for Effective Government, American workplace health and safety is suffering from – and as a result of – a serious lack of resources. While the number of US workplaces doubled between 1981 and 2011 and the number of US workers increased from 73 million to 129 million during this time, during the same 30 years, the number of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspectors has declined. Instead of one inspector for every 1,900 workplaces, there is now only one inspector for every 4,300 workplaces (or, measured in other terms, one…
cmonforton | October 30, 2013A marriage of public health science and civil rights is one way to describe the lifework of John Froines, PhD, professor emeritus at UCLA School of Public Health. After a 50-year career in academia and public service, and the untolled contributions from it, Froines was recognized this week by the internationally renowned Collegium Ramazzini.
The nomination letter submitted to the Collegium by his colleagues captures many highlights of Froines’ impact over several decades, such as:
His high-profile role in the 1960’s anti-war and civil rights movements
His position with the Vermont State…
lborkowski | October 29, 2013I spent much of yesterday at a hearing held by the District of Columbia City Council’s Committee on Business, Consumer, and Regulatory Affairs – but I didn’t manage to stay for the entire 11 hours. Nearly 150 witnesses signed up to testify about the two main issues under consideration: raising the city’s minimum wage, and improving its paid-sick-leave law, which denies many workers access to paid sick days. The presence of so many witnesses, and the many hours they and Committee Chair Vincent Orange spent in the hearing room, demonstrate the importance of these issues that affect so many…
cmonforton | October 28, 2013Earlier this month I wrote about the merits of policies that require conflict of interest disclosures. Last week, two items also about conflicts of interest landed in my in-box. They were just too juicy to not take a bite, and write about here.
First came a commentary from the October 2013 issue of the Annals of Occupational Hygiene written by the journal’s chief editor Noah Seixas, PhD, MS. The lead paragraph reads:
"On 6 June 2013, a court in New York handed down a decision that calls into question the validity of research that was sponsored by Georgia-Pacific [GP] and published in eight…
egrossman | October 23, 2013On October 17, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) announced that it has classified air pollution as a human carcinogen. Although the composition of air pollution and exposure levels vary widely from place to place, IARC says its assessment is applicable worldwide and notes that exposures in rapidly industrializing countries with large populations have increased significantly in recent years. According to the IARC review of the latest scientific studies, exposure to air pollution increases the risk for lung cancer and for bladder cancer. IARC…
lborkowski | October 21, 2013This month's issue of EHS Today includes a special section on Bangladesh factory safety, a topic that has continued to attract news coverage following the April collapse of the Rana Plaza building, which killed more than 1100 workers. Sandy Smith's introductory article summarizes some of the international efforts aimed at improving working condition in Bangladesh, including support of the Bangladeshi National Action Plan for Fire and Building Safety and two different retailer initiatives.
Scott Nova critiques existing factory inspection programs for "their abject failure to provide basic…
cmonforton | October 17, 2013Roger R. King, 62, in West Virginia. Robert Smith, 47, in Illinois. Mark Christopher Stassinos, 44, in Wyoming. Larry Schwartz, 59, in Indiana.
Four coal miners, working in four different States, employed by four different mining companies, all fatally injured on the job during the first eleven days of the government shutdown. King was employed at CONSOL's McElroy mine, Smith at Alliance Resources' Pattiki mine, Stassinos at PacifiCorp's Bridger mine, and Schwartz at Five Star Mining's Prosperity Mine.
I didn’t learn of these deaths from anything posted on the Mine Safety and Health…
cmonforton | October 15, 2013"Es ridículo,” was the reaction of a poultry plant worker when he heard of the USDA's proposal to "modernize" poultry slaughter. The agency's January 2012 proposal (77 Fed Reg 4408) would allow companies to increase assembly line speeds from about 90 to 175 birds per minute, and remove most USDA inspectors from the poultry processing line.
The Obama Administration should have heard the loud and clear opposition from civil rights, food safety, public health and the workers’ safety communities to the USDA’s proposal. When the public comment period closed in May 2012, the Southern Poverty Law…
lborkowski | October 10, 2013Over the course of three days, three miners were killed on the job in West Virginia, Illinois, and Wyoming. Ken Ward Jr. describes their deaths in the Charleston Gazette:
In the recent incidents, 62-year-old Roger R. King of Moundsville was killed Friday when he was hit in the head by part of a chain being used during a longwall machine move at CONSOL Energy's McElroy Mine in Marshall County.
On Saturday, a miner at Alliance Coal's Pattiki Mine in White County, Ill., was killed when an underground cart rolled over and he was pinned underneath it. Local media identified the miner as Robert…
cmonforton | October 9, 2013Who paid for the study? That's an important piece of information to have when considering a study's methods and reported findings. Financial ties are the most obvious conflicts of interest, but others include pre-publication review and other requirements imposed by a study’s sponsors.
Scientists publishing papers in the leading biomedical journals have, for at least ten years, been providing readers with disclosures of real or potential conflicts. The editors of more than 1,300 medical journals require authors to comply with specific disclosure policies. Researchers from other disciplines…
kkrisberg | October 4, 2013While OSHA has never been the most robustly funded federal agency, its efforts and regulatory authority have helped prevent countless deaths, injuries and illnesses on the job. However, recent budget cuts and future budget cut proposals threaten those gains, and it's no stretch to say that worker health and safety hang in the balance.
In a report released in late August by the Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch), author Nick Schwellenbach chronicled what austerity means for OSHA and the workers it protects. To first put the issue and impacts of slashed budgets in broader…
cmonforton | October 3, 2013It's been four months since Captain Bill Dowling responded with his fire station 68 crew to a multi-alarm blaze at the Southwest Inn in Houston. About 150 firefighters arrived on the scene to battle the rapidly-moving fire which started in a restaurant attached to the hotel. Disaster struck, and the May 31, 2013 incident stands as the Houston Fire Department's worst loss of life in its history.
Capt. Dowling and other firefighters from his unit were inside the building when its tile roof collapsed. Firefighters Robert Bebee, 41, Robert Garner, 29, Matthew Renaud, 35, and Anne Sullivan, 24…
cmonforton | October 2, 2013It's Day #2 of the Tea Party's shutdown of the federal government. Shuttered entrances to national parks and museums are immediate and visible signs of this idiocy. The shutdown's effect on key federal public health programs are probably less obvious, but could have substantially more adverse impact on the U.S. population. Superbug's Maryn McKenna wrote yesterday on just a few ways that interruptions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and USDA, could affect your's (and the world's) health. With just a few examples, McKenna captures the…
egrossman | September 30, 2013The long-time residents of Iron County, Wisconsin who make up the Iron County Joint Impacts Mining Committee say the open-pit iron mine planned for the Penokee Hills of northern Wisconsin – a range that extends into Michigan where it’s known as the Gogebic Range – will bring much needed good jobs and economic development. Such jobs, the committee told a group of visiting journalists in August, have been lacking since the last Wisconsin iron mines in the area closed in the early and mid-1960s. The jobs the mine would bring are the type needed to keep local communities’ young people from moving…
lborkowski | September 27, 2013Last year, California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights passed by the state's legislature. Yesterday, he signed a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights that is watered down from its original version but takes the important step of extending overtime protections to nannies and other in-home employees. Domestic workers will earn overtime pay for working more than nine hours a day or 45 hours in a week (higher than the federal cutoff of 40 hours per week). The bill no longer contains the rest and meal breaks from the original version, and it will sunset after three years.…
cmonforton | September 25, 2013Earlier this month, the long-awaited, three-year delayed OSHA silica proposal was published. It's a proposed regulation designed to protect workers employed in construction, foundries, glassmaking, road building and other industries from silicosis, lung cancer and other silica-related diseases.
The proposal does not cover, however, some of the most heavily exposed workers in the U.S.: those employed in the mining industry. These are the workers who routinely drill, cut and load tons of quartz, some of whom work day after day in clouds of silica-laden dust. Protections for these workers…
cmonforton | September 23, 2013Reducing the risk of skin cancer and higher penalties for violence against emergency room personnel were addressed this year in Texas' legislative session. These public health topics not only received attention from lawmakers, they resulted in two new state laws which take effect this month.
Assaults and fatal injuries suffered by healthcare workers is a nationwide and global problem. The Emergency Nurses Association notes that the healthcare industry leads all others in the incidence of nonfatal occupational assaults. One recent study published in the Journal of Nursing Administration…
cmonforton | September 19, 2013Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced last week the Safe Meat and Poultry Act (S. 1502). The bill would require USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) to take new steps to decrease foodborne pathogens, including authority to compel producers to recall contaminated meat and poultry.
The legislative text is 73 pages long, but one short paragraph caught my eye: a provision addressing the serious health and safety hazards to which meat and poultry workers are exposed. It's an issue that we've written about many times (e.g.. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here). It…
lborkowski | September 17, 2013Earlier today, Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez announced that the Department of Labor has finalized a rule extending minimum-wage and overtime protections to home care workers. Starting on January 1, 2015, the wage and overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act will apply to home health aides, personal care aides, and other direct care workers employed by agencies. The agencies will have to pay workers minimum wage ($7.25/hour in those states that haven't adopted higher minimum wages) and 1.5 times their regular wage for hours worked above 40 per week. In addition, workers who travel…