Occupational health
revere | December 1, 2008Barack Obama will become President of the United States in just 50 days, but the still-President, George W. Bush, is still trashing the place prior to going out the door. The latest outrage is the rush to complete a rule the new President is strongly opposed to. Somehow I don't think that's the way it's supposed to work, but that's the way it's working. If you are committed to safer workplaces in this country, the new rule is a monstrosity that will make jobs more dangerous for whoever will still have a job after this administration's policies have played out:
The rule, which has strong…
revere | November 30, 2008A story on the wires about a paper in the journal Epidemiology this month (November) confirms what other work has shown: those beautiful flowers we buy in American florist shops have an added price attached to them, paid by the children of Central America. Epidemiology is one of the top tier journals in the field of epidemiology, but I don't have access to my copy, which is at work (and I'm not), so I'm working off wire service copy (Reuters Health). From what I know of the subject, however, the account is likely accurate. Here's the gist:
In a study from Ecuador, babies and toddlers born to…
revere | November 6, 2008Three years ago we discussed (we were still on blogspot then) a spreading outbreak of a mysterious disease in Sichuan (Szechuan), China. Any mysterious disease outbreak in China always raises warning flags since southern China is the incubator for influenza. The Chinese discounted the possibility of bird flu, saying it was instead a massive outbreak caused by the bacterium Streptococcus suis, Type 2, an important cause of disease in pigs. S. suis sometimes causes human menigitis or septic shock, but the final total of 215 cases and 38 deaths seemed atypical. But it turned out Chinese…
revere | September 12, 2008Bush has announced he will reduce the forces in Iraq by 8000 by early 2009. My first thought (after "that's it? I thought we were victorious"; and let's get all of them out now as fast as we can) was to wonder what condition they will be in and what's in store for them in the future? I thought about that particularly because of the emerging scientific literature on strange and rare diseases in Gulf region veterans. One of these diseases is Lou Gehrig's Disease (medical name, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS). ALS, while rare (about 1 - 2 cases per 100,000 population in the US each year),…
revere | August 22, 2008Yesterday was the 12th 22nd anniversary of an environmental catastrophe in Cameroon. On August 21, 1986 Lake Nyos in that West African country belched a huge load of carbon dioxide and suffocated 1700 people as they slept. Like its monoxygenated cousin carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide is "a colorless, odorless gas that can kill you in your sleep," as the marketing gurus of monoxide detector like to say, but it was true in spades on that fateful day 22 years ago. Carbon dioxide doesn't kill the same way as carbon monoxide, which binds tightly to the homoglobin in your blood, shutting out the…
revere | August 16, 2008One of the effects of high gas prices is to encourage people to use bicycles. This also includes the police, where some jurisdictions are taking cops out of cruisers and putting them on foot or on bikes. Bike police (and bicycle messengers, people who use their bikes in crowded urban areas to endanger pedestrians), spend much more time in the saddle than most, other than professional racers and bike fanatics. A new study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine says the continual pressure on thei perineum is causing genital numbness in males. The culprit seems to be the nose on the traditional bike…
revere | August 1, 2008There's a mighty storm a brewin' in the occupational health world. It is always a marvel to us that no matter how jaded we think we are, there is always room for more indignation. It is the Bush administration's only form of renewable energy.
The issue first poked its head above water on July 8 when my colleague Celeste Monforton over at The Pump Handle noticed something suspicious on the website of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA, pronounced oh-EYE-ra):
I found the most curious item on OMB OIRA's webpage today, and my paranoia about…
revere | July 28, 2008As we noted two days ago in a post about how the produce industry is now interested in tracking regulations they previously opposed after being whacked with billions of dollars in losses because of a protracted Salmonella outbreak whose source was presumably produce but couldn't be easily traced, the sugar industry is now also interested in OSHA regulations for combustible dusts. All it took was the deaths of 13 workers at the Imperial Sugar Refinery in Savannah, Georgia. That and the thrid largest fine in OSHA history, $8.7 million. The facts suggest that the $8.7 million was a lot more…
revere | July 15, 2008What's a little sodium dichromate, anyway? So it's a known human carcinogen and can do a lot of other nasty things. No big deal. Not for Iraq war contractor, KBR, anyway. At the time KBR was a subsidiary of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton. So when they were given a lucrative contract to clean up and safeguard Iraqi oilfields after the Bush Mission was Accomplished in 2003, they told the soldiers and workers that the chemical, used as an antirust agent and then strewn all over the oil facilities, was a "mild irritant." Later they admitted…
revere | July 6, 2008It's not bad enough that the professional heart of CDC is heading for the exits as fast as they can get there in response to the high handed, abrasive and incompetent management of its Director, Dr. Julie Gerberding. Not bad enough at all. Dr. Gerberding now is getting rid of good people who haven't voluntarily jumped ship. Celeste Montforton at the public health blog, The Pump Handle, where we sometimes post and which is one of the mainstays of the public health blogosphere, brings us news that Dr. John Howard, Director for the last six years of the National Institute of Occupational Health…
revere | June 22, 2008The hardest and most dangerous agricultural work in the United States is not done by people who are citizens. It is done by immigrants. Some don't have proper documents but many do. Documents don't protect workers from dying. And agricultural workers die of heat stroke at 20 times the rate of other workers:
In mid-July 2005, a male Hispanic worker with an H-2A work visa (i.e., a temporary, nonimmigrant foreign worker hired under contract to perform farm work) aged 56 years was hand-harvesting ripe tobacco leaves on a North Carolina farm. He had arrived from Mexico 4 days earlier and was on…
revere | June 11, 2008You know any post that starts out . . .
Gerardo Castillo, 30 years old, had worked at the Blommer Chocolate Co. for 9 years. His family wanted him to quite ever since an explosion in a roaster killed a fellow worker and injured another. He was fearful himself, but he stayed on . . .
is going to end badly. You'd be right. Continuing with our post . . .
But on the weekend, something terrible happened at Blommer's four story factory on Chicago's Near West Side, after an unnamed substance was added to a batch of chocolate resulting in a chemical reaction that produced ammonia or an ammonia-…
revere | June 8, 2008The controversy over the health of rescue workers at the World Trade Center site goes on. The Wall Street area was re-opened quickly after 9/11 despite EPA air tests that showed hazardous materials in the air by direct orders from Condeleeza Rice's office when she was National Security advisor to George Bush. High asbestos levels were omitted from press releases because of "competing priorities," according to an article in the New York Post in September 2006 (long pull quotes in the post linked above but the new link has since been taken down). So political interference has already been…
revere | May 23, 2008If you aren't in the business of figuring out if a chemical is a health hazard you might never have heard of the EPA's IRIS (Integrated Risk Information System) database but suffice it to say it is a wealth of valuable information on the topic. Considered authoritative by many states and countries, its judgements have become the basis for official standards. It's been around since the start of Reagan's second term (1985) so there is no claim it is some kind of fringe environmentalist fantasy. It's not the Last Word but it's a loud voice and taken seriously by anyone tasked with protecting the…
revere | May 22, 2008Over the years I've seen more than enough of the murderous destruction "the magic mineral, "asbestos, has caused in the lives of workers and their families. Exposure to asbestos causes a serious, often fatal, scarring of the lungs called asbestosis and also two different kinds of cancer of the respiratory tract: lung cancer and mesothelioma. Both cancers are usually fatal, but while lung cancer can be caused by other agents like cigarettes and various occupational chemicals, mesothelioma is mostly a result of exposure to asbestos. "Meso," as it is often called, is a horrific disease. It…
revere | May 12, 2008Suppose someone owned and managed business premises which had recently experienced a dangerous incident. They were also carrying out work there that was generally acknowledged by the industry to be risky. But when a government official came around they misrepresented the earlier incident and publicly denied they were engaging in any risky practices. The government official wasn't too inquisitive and told them it was OK by him to use the risky technique. So they continued to do so and six of their workers died as a result along with three rescue workers. What would you say about such a…
revere | April 18, 2008The occupational disease in slaughterhouse workers who extract pig brains using compressed air is growing in number. It is still small because this process seems to be uncommon. We first discussed it last December when there were 11 cases and its origin was uncertain. It didn't have an official name, although it was identified as a chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP). There were 11 cases then. In February we did a follow-up after CDC published a preliminary report that confirmed the relationship with the compressed air process in the original set of Minnesota patients (…
revere | March 11, 2008As part of our jobs many of us read literature that few others see. For example, every two months I get a journal called Industrial Health, published (in English) by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health of Japan. It's been around for a long time (it is now in Volume 46) and it's pretty good. It frequently has papers that are interesting and the December 2007 issue (which just arrived in my mailbox) is an example. One article is entitled, "Biomechanical and physiological analyses of a luggage-pulling task," by Jung, Haight and Hallbeck. It's about those two-wheeled…
revere | February 27, 2008Chromium is OK when it's on your car bumper but not so OK when it's in your workplace air or your drinking water. That's because chromium, in some of its forms, causes cancer. In fact it is a remarkably good carcinogen. A few years, ago both epidemiological studies and risk estimates done by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suggested the lifetime risk of dying of lung cancer for workers exposed at the then workplace limits as about 25%. This is higher than for heavy cigarette smokers. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) lowered the workplace standard by a…